Via Forbes, some unwelcome news: Vaccine-Resistant Bird Flu Spreading in Asia. Excerpt:
A new strain of vaccine-resistant H5N1 bird flu virus has emerged in China and is spreading through southeast Asia, Hong Kong researchers report.
"The implications are that current control measures are ineffective with dealing with the evolutionary changes that H5N1 undergoes," warned Dr. Yi Guan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Diseases at the University of Hong Kong and lead author of a report in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new strain has become dominant throughout the region, replacing other variants of the virus, the report said.
"We think that this virus is likely to have already instigated a third wave of H5N1 infection in this region, as it is already widespread in southern China and has also been detected in other neighboring countries," Guan said.
The reason for the new strain's dominance is that "it was not as easily affected as other strains by the avian vaccine used to prevent H5 infection," the Hong Kong expert said. "What this means is that H5 avian vaccines are not able to prevent infection by this virus as efficiently as they do with other strains of H5N1."
Here is the abstract of the PNAS article. The authors include not just Guan Yi but also Robert Webster and other major researchers. I hope that better-informed persons than I will give this report the analysis it deserves.
