China fights back bird flu menace with new vaccine

China fights back bird flu menace with new vaccine

The Chinese government, on Friday, gave the requisite nod for mass scale production of a new and effective vaccine created by scientists to tackle the bird flu menace gripping the country. The new vaccine will safeguard China's huge and precious poultry against the killer disease and as a value-add, will ward off another fatalistic ailment called Newcastle disease.

It is said to be the world's first active bird flu vaccine. The goal is to now make available around 1 billion doses in the next one month and distribute them at the start of the New Year, to be used along with existing vaccines.

At present, China is using a vaccine which needs to be injected. The new one has myriad applications such as injections, nasal sprays or eye drops or can even be added to water. It promises to mass protect the poultry from bird flu and Newcastle disease, both. The latter is an infectious viral affliction which affects domesticated poultry and wild birds alike.

The new vaccine will immunize poultry much faster and at much lower costs, sources say. The lesser price is due to a lower production cost, which is just one fifth of the cost for existing vaccines in the market. Additionally, the multi-application dimension allows for a cut in labor costs. The live vaccine also has a longer shelf life of 18 months.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the vaccine was developed in the Harbin institute during four years of dogged research.

Earlier this year, China reported 31 eruptions of bird flu in poultry and six in humans, including two deaths. September saw Newcastle eruptions killing a minimum of 56,700 chickens in Mainland China. In a bid to stall the infection from spreading, the Chinese government ran vaccination campaigns for poultry on a massive scale. The Chinese poultry population is the biggest in the world, with 14 billion fowls born every year. With danger looming on such a large and valuable asset of the economy, the government soon announced its intention to immunize and protect the whole poultry industry.

The regular vaccines used against the flu are “inactivated”, which means the virus is destroyed. In “live” vaccines however, weak manifestations of the virus are present.

Scientists at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute used a process called reverse genetics to create what is called the recombinant bivalent vaccine, which contains a weakened strain of the Newcastle vaccine called LaSota.

The fear that the infection can lead to a human epidemic has been allayed since scientists say that the research on the new vaccine and the subsequent mass production process will provide a benchmark from where the development of vaccines for the human infections can be derived.

Trials of the indigenous vaccine have begun last week and the first set of results is expected in about three months.

China has overseen the immunization of 6.85 billion birds till December this year, of which 5 billion have been vaccinated since October itself. With such stringent sprucing of the campaign, this month witnessed only one case of bird flu.

The State Forestry Administration has also announced that it will overview how much the monitoring stations, set up for tracking animal epidemics in the country, have achieved.

Shigeru Omi, the regional director of the World Health Organization for Asia, has however warned that vaccinations have about 75 % effectiveness only and cannot be considered absolutely foolproof.