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Fear Of Pandemic Motivates Production Of Vaccine

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Apr 27, 2009 10:08 pm US/Mountain

Fear Of Pandemic Motivates Production Of Vaccine

Good Question: Can we get a vaccine for the swine flu?

Written by Alan Gionet
Reporting
Alan Gionet
DENVER (CBS4) ― The news came to University of Colorado Denver's Dr. Edward Janoff during a telephone call with the Centers for Disease Control. The virus is a new one in North America, never seen before. Janoff works at a Veteran's Administration lab studying infectious diseases and researching vaccines.

This swine flu variant seems to be killing people in the prime of life. Remarkable considering 36,000 people in the U.S. die every year from the flu and 90 percent of them are over 65. It sounds strange, but some people may be too healthy.

"We think that when you get the flu or other infections, your body starts responding to them and starting to fight them. Sometimes that response is too vigorous," Janoff said. "Your body would just make a tremendous acute rapid inflammatory response, which would make your blood pressure go down, organ failure and death."

The same thing happened in the flu pandemic of 1918. It killed tens of millions. Today the fear of a pandemic like that one motivates health experts to act quickly. Vaccines have been developed the same way for decades. They don't have to be perfect. Like horseshoes or hand grenades, a near hit can do it.

"You want protection against getting sick," Janoff said. "But what you really want is protection against hospitalization and death."

They work to make the vaccine go after the virus' coat to prevent the virus from creating a bond to our bodies causing disease.

"The vaccine in general tries to mimic the virus, it tries to look like the virus, but not cause disease. Because when you see a foreign thing your body says, 'Oh this is foreign, it's not good.' We make anti-bodies, which are proteins our body makes to fight against infections we make T cells, which fight infections."

Changes in recent years mean there's more preparation before an outbreak and the making of a vaccine is well understood.

"Going from knowing the virus in a small number of cases to growing in large volume to making the manufacturing of it and the distribution and the administration all of those things can take time," Janoff said. Once you have the virus, "You have to grow it up, which we can do now, but then you have to manufacture it in large amounts. But then you have to get it packaged and distributed and get it to people and wait for them to make an immune response."

Janoff says that can take three to six months.

Anti-viral treatments like Tamiflu, which the government has stockpiled, may be called upon before that to treat the illness. They are effective against this new strain of swine flu. Three to six months to get the vaccine may simply be too long.

Questions?

Coloradans can call state health officials at 1-877-462-2911 with questions about the swine flu.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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