University of Leicester Researcher Leading Trials on Bird Flu Vaccine

An internationally renowned expert at the University of Leicester has been carrying out leading research into vaccines to combat avian flu, often called ’bird flu’, which it is feared could trigger a pandemic as lethal as those of 1918, 1957 and 1968.

Karl Nicholson, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Leicester and the Leicester Royal Infirmary, has been responding to the urgent need to evaluate different vaccine formulations to identify the best way to protect people from strains of bird flu that have jumped from birds into man. A number of people with confirmed H5 bird flu have died during the current outbreak in Asia. It is believed that all of these cases were acquired directly from infected birds. There is no evidence yet of person-to-person spread.

Agricultural practices in this part of the world, where humans, ducks, poultry and pigs live closely together, may encourage the mixing of human and bird flu viruses into forms which can spread rapidly from person-to person internationally like SARS.

Studies of H5 and H9 vaccines published in the Lancet by Professor Nicholson with Dr John Wood at the National Institute of Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC), Dr Maria Zambon, at the Health Protection Agency Central Laboratory in Colindale, London, and vaccine manufacturers indicate that it will be necessary to give people two doses of vaccine, and even then the antibody responses may be less than optimal.

Professor Nicholson commented: „We have no vaccines against the new H5 variant of bird flu yet, and won’t have one for several months more at least. Work on developing one is progressing in Dr Wood’s laboratory at NIBSC.“