Editor’s Note

Every year, influenza A and B cause epidemics that lead to an average of 36,000 deaths and 114,000 hospitalizations in the United States alone. Periodically, new influenza strains evolve with the capacity to cause pandemics (epidemics that spread around the globe). The ...

Despite improvements in technology and increased automation, egg-based vaccine production still has a long timeline.

The two influenza viruses that are medically and clinically important to the human population, known as Type A and Type B, are segmented, negative-strand genomes with an envelope ...

The keys to survival of a pandemic will be surveillance, public health planning, and a publicly agreed strategy for behavior.

When talking about the development of vaccines to avert an influenza pandemic, we must keep in mind a sobering fact. A very well run vaccine development program, from ...

The next generation of influenza vaccines will be cell-culture-based for seasonal influenza and for pandemics.

Leading manufacturers of vaccines and antiviral drugs are working hard to develop new and novel methods of preparing seasonal influenza vaccines, as well as pandemic vaccine candidates. ...

The tools and methods of industrial biotechnology could be adapted to produce pharmaceutical proteins for a pandemic influenza vaccine.

At Genencor, an industrial biotechnology company, full-scale industrial manufacturing of proteins at volumes of 30,000,000 gram-active proteins per month is ...

H5N1 may be the first real test of a rapid pharmaceutical response to a pandemic.

As H5N1 spreads around the world, the requirements for pandemic preparedness are being discussed on an unprecedented international scale. Despite an increasing awareness of need, the question remains: is the ...

Health care providers and public health officials can use proven mathematical models to plan responses to a pandemic.

In the past decade, major changes have been made in the way governments and international agencies plan for the management and control of epidemics. These changes have been ...