CGD Senior Fellow Maureen Lewis was interviewed on Radio Free Europe about the development of a vaccine for the bird flu.
From the Article:
"The problem is that the strain of the disease that will allow human to human transmission -- which is really the serious problem that we're worried about -- doesn't exist yet," Maureen Lewis, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development, explains. "So we can't really develop a vaccine against that or an effective treatment because we don't know exactly what it looks like. And viruses are notoriously unstable."
According to Lewis, scientists learned valuable lessons from an earlier global health scare, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). That flu-like illness started in China and eventually swept through 25 other countries from late 2002 to 2003.
"The world community actually did a lot of research on SARS when it emerged," Lewis says. "And, you almost had a competition among the laboratories to figure out what the genome structure was so that they could develop a vaccine. And they did. And they did it very quickly. And in a sense, they are trying to do that now."