Help on the way for bird flu
The article by Chiu Yu-tzu ("Taiwan keeping vigilant against bird flu," Nov. 25, page 2) expresses the hope that culling and early reporting will contain the current threat of bird flu, and at the same time it states that the government will reportedly invest in vaccine research and development.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly expressed the concern, both for the presently affected Asian countries and for the rest of the world, that the current bird flu may represent the first stage of an overdue pandemic for which no one is prepared.
The deficiencies in current methodology both for early warning of flu outbreaks as well as for egg-based vaccine production have been stressed by scientific groups worldwide.
We wish to inform all concerned agencies and scientific groups that we have recently made significant progress in both early detection and new synthetic "Ebird flu" vaccines which will be detailed in a book to be published in February next year entitled Killer Replikins: the Chemistry of Rapid Replication.
We have discovered a peptide chemistry which correlates quantitatively with the past three pandemics and has accurately predicted the last two H5N1 outbreaks nine months to one year in advance.
This also has made possible the identification of both conserved and new peptide "Replikins" associated with rapid virus replication and permits the timely advanced synthesis and testing of new specific highly immunostimulant vaccines.
Our current advance flu warning data indicates that the production of the H5N1 virus is continuing to increase and accelerate, rather than decreasing as it has in the past when a strain-specific flu outbreak was about to subside.
In advance of the book's publication, we would be pleased to make available these new methods and products, and to join both profit and nonprofit efforts in Taiwan in these areas.
Dr. Samuel Bogoch
Chairman, Foundation for Research on the Nervous System and Replikins, Ltd, Bermuda and Boston
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