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Published online 20 May 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.844
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Bird flu vaccine to hit the shelves
Europe approves pandemic vaccine; countries must decide own strategies.
The European Commission has approved a new vaccine against the H5N1 bird flu virus — the first vaccine designed to ward off a future pandemic. But how the drug, called Prepandrix, will be deployed by national governments remains unclear.
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This sounds promising, but our first line of defense is not the anti-virals. Instead it is in monitoring for possible cases of H5N1 infection in humans and for any evidence of human-to-human spread. SARS was beaten back by getting ahead of the disease, identifying its possible carriers while that was still feasible and closing down its routes for infecting new people. Part of the reason that this was possible was because SARS was still new to our species and not yet very efficient at moving from one human host to the next. Just as with SARS, I expect that any H5N1 virus that gains human-to-human transmission ability will need time to adapt itself to our species and become "good" at it. That is a window of opportunity for shutting the virus down well short of its becoming a pandemic. Even so, Prepandrix and the other anti-virals may well be part of the means used to stop an emergent H5N1 threat cold.