Roche Holding AG (ROG.VX: Quote, Profile, Research) on Tuesday said there had been no new evidence that resistance to its drug Tamiflu was on the rise, as governments move to deploy the treatment against avian influenza in humans.
It sounds like the stuff of a campy ’50s horror movie (“It Came from the Ice!”), but a Bowling Green State University biologist believes it’s a very real possibility.
BioCryst’s Peramivir is a new flu drug that can kill deadly strains of bird flu, and this antiviral drug is promising to transform global preparations for an influenza pandemic.
The Public Health Agency of Canada has signed a deal to purchase 500,000 treatment units of the flu drug Relenza to be added to the federal pandemic influenza stockpile.
North Korea is stepping up measures to prevent bird flu, its official media said today. North Korea will take all precautions to prevent the spread of an outbreak of the highly virulent H5N1 strain in South Korea.
South Korean quarantine officials are scrambling to control an outbreak of the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu in one of the Korea?s biggest poultry producing areas, cordoning off infected farms and slaughtering thousands of birds, and disinfecting the area.
Japan has suspended poultry imports from South Korea from Thursday after a suspected case of bird flu was found at a poultry farm in the southwest of the country, a Japanese Agriculture Ministry official said on Friday.
The Nha Trang Institute of Vaccines and Biological Products, Vietnam has announced that it has successfully produced 5,000 doses of a H5N1 vaccine for humans from chicken embryos, which is currently being validated by the Ministry of Health before possible human trials.
The UK Government has rejected claims that millions of elderly and infirm people are being put at risk of contracting potentially life-threatening flu because of problems distributing the vaccine.
South Korea’s farm ministry said on Thursday it had discovered a suspected case of bird flu at a poultry farm in the southwest of the country, which could be the country’s first outbreak in about three years.