Read the entire Yahoo! News article
Two new approaches to producing a flu vaccine are described: producing vaccines in cell culture, instead of eggs, and DNA vaccines. Neither is a proven technology. Both offer the possibility of greatly speeding up the process, currently requiring about a year, of moving from a selected vaccine to having adequate stocks of the vaccine produced, to immunizing large populations.
It is often the case that the advocates of such technologies are optimistic about their development and eventual utility.
It seems to me that development of technologies to improve the vaccine production process should be given high priority. It seems likely that some of the alternatives will eventually succeed, and whether useful for the immediately threatened flu epidemic, they would be very useful in the long run.
It also seems to me that it would be unreasonable to put too much faith in the development of new technologies to solve our problems in the next year or three.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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