Bill Gates to help Indonesia develop human bird-flu vaccine

Bill Gates to help Indonesia develop human bird-flu vaccine

This is fantastic news. Just the sort of news we should be reporting on every day. Let’s see our newspapers filled with these good news stories and see the world’s readers inspired (brainwashed you may say) to the point where constructive acts such as this by Bill Gates become part of our everyday psyche right through our media savvy society.
A further development on Bill Gates' goal for 1 lap top per 20 students might be to assist the “One Lap Top per Child” program being rolled out around the globe: http://laptop.org/

Progress with bird flu vaccine...
:cool:
Experts: New Bird Flu Shot Promising
Wednesday, Jun. 11, 2008 - The first experimental bird flu vaccine made from lab-grown cells instead of chicken eggs shows promise in blocking the highly lethal virus, scientists report.

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The advance is good news not just for preparations in case of a pandemic, but also because it offers a way to make shots for seasonal flu much faster. That gives health officials crucial extra time to better match annual shots to the flu strains circulating. It also would reduce dependence on the antiquated system of using millions of eggs to make flu vaccines and could cut production time roughly in half, to as little as 12 weeks, according to maker Baxter International Inc.

Results of mid-stage testing of the Baxter vaccine, Celvapan, showed two shots produced an immune response considered strong enough to protect 76% of healthy adults from both the H5N1 Vietnam strain it targets and the related Hong Kong strain; it appeared to protect 45% from a third, Indonesian strain. “I think it is a big leap forward," said Dr. Wilbur Chen, a vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine not involved in the study.

Since the first outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, more than 240 people in Asia, Europe and Africa have died from bird flu, which kills about two-thirds of people infected. Nearly all had close contact with poultry, but scientists worry bird flu could mutate to a form easily spread among people, who have no natural immunity. Many experts believe a pandemic will eventually occur. On Wednesday, Hong Kong health officials ordered the slaughter of all live poultry in street markets due to one of the largest outbreaks of the virus in birds in years.

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