Aventis, Chiron to Test Bird Flu Vaccine on Humans

Aventis-Pasteur and Chiron Corp are due to start human testing of a vaccine against bird flu as early as this month, a World Health Organization official said on Saturday, to try to prevent a pandemic that could kill millions of people.

“Two firms, Aventis and Chiron have been working on a clinical small series. They have finished that and it is being tested,” Klaus Stohr, the head of the WHO’s global influenza program, told Reuters by telephone. “At the beginning of next year or in December it will go into clinical tests on humans.” The H5N1 strain of bird flu — an endemic in a number of Asian countries, which health officials fear could eventually mutate into a lethal new virus that will spread rapidly among humans — has been sounding alarms with health officials. A World Health Organization expert said last month that the H5N1 virus is most likely to cause the next human flu pandemic. Experts fear a repetition of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic thought to have killed more than 20 million people. International health officials have warned for years that a flu pandemic is overdue because the last one, which killed between one million and four million, occurred back in 1968. The WHO has said that vaccines and antiviral drugs could then be in short supply in the first months. On Wednesday, the WHO said it was stepping up efforts to ensure governments around the globe are ready to fight the killer flu pandemic, which the U.N. agency fears may be on its way. While vaccines would not stop a pandemic the tests were a step in the right direction, Stohr said. “The spread of a pandemic in principle cannot be stopped but its impact can be reduced,” Stohr said. He said the WHO’s potential death toll of two to seven million deaths was a “best-case scenario,” adding that hundreds of millions of people would fall ill from a pandemic. An Aventis spokesman was not immediately available for comment.(Source: World Health Organisation, Reuters, December 2004)