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  • Ending Poverty and Hunger: Meeting the Challenge of Millennium Development Goal 1 11/24
  • The Global Food Crisis: "The Silent Tsunami" The Brookings Institutions "will host a discussion on nutrition, school feeding programs and food security in the developing world, featuring World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick; Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme; and Samuel Worthington, president and CEO of InterAction." 11/24
  • A Call to Copenhagen – Health Effects of Climate Change "Members of the press are invited to the unveiling and policy discussion of a major international study on the Public Health Impacts of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions being published in Lancet, just in time for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), one of the National Institutes of Health, is sponsoring the event which will feature speakers from around the world gathered in Washington, DC and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine participating via live video conferencing." 11/25

CDC Scientists Develop New Basis for H5N1 Vaccine

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Friday, May 29, 2009

By using samples of the H5N1 (avian flu) virus obtained from Egypt, CDC scientists have developed a virus sample critical to the production of a bird flu vaccine, the WHO said Thursday, Reuters reports.

Though the H5N1 virus does not spread easily via human-to-human transmission as the H1N1 (swine flu) virus does, the H5N1 virus has proven more deadly, killing 261 of the 424 people infected since 2003 (MacInnis, Reuters, 5/28). The Ministry of Health of Egypt on Tuesday confirmed two new human cases of avian flu, the WHO reports (Avian Influenza – situation in Egypt – update 17, 5/28). In February, there were more than 250 confirmed outbreaks of H5N1 in birds in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal and Vietnam, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.  

"Pharmaceutical companies including Novartis are already working on vaccines against H5N1 bird flu, which has killed or forced the culling of more than 300 million birds since 2003 as it spread to 61 countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa," Reuters writes.

In a statement, the WHO encouraged countries to share H5N1 virus samples with the organization for "their inclusion in the WHO H5N1 vaccine development and selection process, in addition to other activities of public health significance" (Reuters, 5/28). A two-day intergovernmental WHO meeting held earlier this month ended without a final international virus-sharing agreement (Kaiser Global Health Policy Report, 5/18).

The Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report is published by the Kaiser Family Foundation. © 2009 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.