A locally developed emergency vaccine against the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu is expected to be ready for clinical trials in the second half of this year, a senior Department of Health (DOH) official said on Friday.
The emergency vaccine, developed by the National Health Research Institute, will mainly be used for emergency use in the event of an H5N1 outbreak in humans, said Shih Wen-yi (施文儀), deputy director of the DOH’s Centers for Disease Control.
Shih said the DOH was scheduled to authorize clinical trials for the locally developed bird flu vaccines in the second quarter of this year and that the first phase of the trials were expected to get underway in the third quarter.
As the research institute has a limited production capacity, Shih said, the locally developed vaccine would only be enough for emergency use if Taiwan was struck by an H5N1 outbreak in humans.
A few years ago, the DOH launched a build-operate-own (BOO) project under which a private contractor was chosen to produce locally developed human bird flu vaccines.
The bid, however, was dropped because the winning contractor was later merged into another entity in a corporate restructuring.
Shih said the DOH was appraising the feasibility of renewing the BOO project to draw the private sector into investing in human H5N1 vaccine production.
Meanwhile, a research team headed by Academia Sinica President Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠) at the institute’s Genomics Research Center has developed DNA-based vaccines against both human influenza and avian flu, academic sources said.
The sources said the procedural platform developed by the team could produce the DNA-based vaccines for emergency use within six months.
The team’s research findings have been published in the US science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching