Extra: WHO and St. Jude Win Award
Except it's not the kind they were hoping for:
Worst Betrayal of Global Public Trust:
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis, TN)
World Health Organization (WHO)
[Click the image for more information.]
MABs, Piracy, and St. Jude's
While the effort to prevent piracy of WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network materials has (with good reason) so far mainly focused on viruses and their genes, there are other kinds of theft that will need to be confronted.
Antisera are the chemicals produced by the immune system when it tries to fight off an infection. They are highly specific to the particular strain that has infected the body, and sometimes provide cross-protection to other flu strains. Like the old "gamma globulin" shots for Hepatitis A (now largely replaced by a vaccine), shots of H5N1 antibodies may theoretically help fight off a bird flu infection.
About Immunocompetent
I am weary of public health G.I. Joes (and Janes) and other obsessives and their threats that we're all gonna die of bird flu.
I am turned off by the callous and poorly reasoned bashing of foreigners that fills many flu blogs.
I believe that greed and poor governance in the US and EU plays a huge and underexplored role in the sad state of global readiness for a flu pandemic.
I am sure that national security and public health ought not to be mixed up in the way they have become.
Immunocompetent is a place for enlightened talk about Bird Flu, and where xenophobia and fearmongering are banned.
Here you will find fresh perspective about the serious problem of potentially pandemic influenza. You'll get information and analysis that you won't find blogged elsewhere, because this site doesn't just comment on the news, it aims to make it.
From 1999 to 2008 your host, Edward Hammond, directed the Sunshine Project, a nongovernmental organization focusing on biological weapons and biosafety. He first stuck his toe into influenza issues in 2003, when the Sunshine Project issued one of the first public warnings that US scientists were intending to recreate 1918 influenza. Since 2006 he has focused on H5N1 issues, specifically, questions of access and benefit sharing related to influenza viruses.