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Re-activateThe Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, announced last week that the agency would be moving forward in its preparations for vaccine development. HHS is directing $1 billion in funds to be used to conduct clinical studies over the summer and to prepare for large-scale commercial production of a swine (H1N1) flu vaccine.
Also, the CDC announced that a new study has found that the virus likely emerged from pigs, and that the influenza genes that make up the new virus had probably been circulating unnoticed in swine populations for at least a decade. The study concludes that hog operations will likely need increased monitoring for flu viruses in the future, and to prevent this swine flu virus from reemerging from pigs.
The good news from the study is that most of the new swine flu viruses in humans show a very similar genetic makeup. That means that it may be somewhat easier to develop a vaccine that will be effective against the new H1N1 viruses now circulating. The CDC does note, however, that now that the virus is being transmitted in humans, they expect it to evolve more quickly than it had in pig populations.
Read the rest of this post on our Health blog, and see our ongoing swine flu coverage for more information.
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