H7N9 vaccine trials urged as new cases continue to emerge_美文

H7N9 vaccine trials urged as new cases continue to emerge

"It's better that clinical trials (for H7N9 vaccine products) start sooner because it takes time to complete the testing," said Shu from the influenza center.

A 53-year-old man in Jiangsu province was diagnosed with H7N9 on Saturday. The provincial health bureau said he transported two truckloads of chicken feathers from butchered chickens before he got sick.

A 75-year-old woman diagnosed with H7N9 in Nanjing on Jan 30 died on Friday despite emergency treatment, the bureau said.

However, Shu said there is no need for a large-scale immunization because the infections remain sporadic and the virus doesn't transmit effectively among humans.

He Jianfeng, chief expert at the Guangdong province Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said it is not cost-effective to carry out a large-scale immunization right now. But he emphasized that an H7N9 vaccine could help guarantee large-scale immunization when the virus is found to be able to transmit among human effectively.

He doesn't expect the virus to mutate so much as to make the technology to produce H7N9 vaccines ineffective.

"As long as it remains to be H7N9, the mutation will not require much change in the technology for us to produce a vaccine against it," he said. "We'll just need a new strain of H7N9 virus to produce the vaccine with the same technology, just like we use new strains of other kinds of flu virus to produce effective vaccines every year, because the viruses, though they are the same ones, become slightly different from year to year."