Six volunteers received an experimental avian influenza vaccine
in the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing on Wednesday, the
first batch to do so.
The vaccine, an inactivated sample of the virulent H5N1 strain
of bird flu, was jointly developed by the Beijing-based Sinovac
Biotech Co and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and
Prevention (China
CDC).
The volunteers are the first of 120 selected for the study,
which aims to test the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, and
reported no untoward reactions within half an hour of
inoculation.
The trial will last nine months, but preliminary conclusions are
expected in around three months.
The volunteers were chosen from healthy people from Beijing aged
between 18 and 60.
Sinovac, which developed the world's first SARS vaccine, had its
pre-clinical trials endorsed by a Ministry of Science and
Technology (MOST) expert
group on October 14 and applied to the State Food and Drug
Administration (SFDA) for
human test on October 21, which was approved the next day.
The company began to develop a human bird flu vaccine in early
2004, and the SFDA said it had fast-tracked examination procedures
for it.
Currently, seven other drug firms in the world, including in the
US, EU and Japan, are also developing vaccines of this kind.
Also on Wednesday, Li Changyou, deputy director of the Ministry
of Agriculture's Veterinary Bureau, said 5 billion poultry
have been immunized since October. The ministry announced on
November 15 that it intended to vaccinate China's entire poultry
population of 14 billion.
(Xinhua News Agency December 22, 2005)