From Peter Dunnill, Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering, University College London
The most recent of your valuable, consciousness raising articles on bird flu notes the concern that the Tamiflu drug may or may not be effective and that it will take many months to produce a viral vaccine (4 June, p 10).
However, we do still have options. One is DNA vaccines. They were discovered in the early 1990s but were a disappointment then. Now a company has had a successful phase 1 trial with a DNA flu vaccine and our lab has shown that it should be possible to produce kilograms of vaccine in existing facilities in weeks rather than months.
If early pandemic fatalities were at 0.2 per cent of the global population, a tenth of the 1918 level, one might not wish to risk a new type of vaccine. If they showed signs of remaining at 20 per cent (1.2 billion deaths) or even dropped to the 1918 level (120 million deaths) it would seem sensible to let people choose whether on not to take a risk on a new vaccine.
London, UK
