Taiwan - Research team claims breakthrough in bird flu vaccine

10:21:58 510353 Indonesia - Thousands of chickens and pet birds destroyed to halt spread of bird flu AP TELEVISION Jakarta, 21 Jan 2007 1. Various of poultry 10:22:12 511154 Taiwan - Research team claims breakthrough in bird flu vaccine AP TELEVISION Maioli, 29 Jan 2007 1. Close-up of two bottles of H5N1 vaccine bulk 2. Close-up of label on bottle reading "H5N1 avian flu vaccine bulk" 3. Various of researchers in laboratory STORYLINE: Taiwan said in January it has developed a high-yield, safe bird flu vaccine, becoming one of the countries near the stage of producing a vaccine against the H5N1 virus. Taiwan's National Health Research Institute succeeded recently in developing the vaccine after 17 months of research. The team had to start from "ground zero" because Taiwan had not engaged in similar programmes before, said Pele Chong, who leads the vaccine development programme at the institute. Chong said it took 4 months to set up the laboratory, and another 13 months to develop the vaccine. Taiwan has not reported any human cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, but several fowl smuggled from China tested positive in 2005. Singapore, China and India are researching bird flu vaccines, following the lead of Western pharmaceutical firms. In case a bird flu epidemic should break out in Taiwan, the state-funded agency will have the capability to produce small amounts of the vaccine in its laboratory and give limited injections to poultry farmers and medical personnel, institute officials said. A production line will be built by the end of the year and formal production is expected to begin in late 2008 following months of human clinical tests, they said. "If we are fast enough to produce 200-thousand in three months, that means if we follow the schedule, we can complete this production at the end of this year," said Su Yi-jen, the director of Vaccine Research and Development Centre. As a latecomer in the field, Chong said Taiwan opted for the more advanced cell-culture technology instead of the traditional method of developing vaccines using poultry eggs. Chong said his team manages to enhance the vaccine yield by implanting the strain into dog kidneys to multiply the number of viruses. "Now we are doing optimum doses to see which dose will give us a hundred percent protection," Chong said. Taiwan hopes to eventually produce up to 80,000 doses of the vaccine a month, institute officials said. Bird flu has claimed at least 163 lives worldwide since it began ravaging Asian poultry farms in late 2003, according to the World Health Organisation. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ee79bf24b875f4accb5bcfc36f0765c2 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork