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Lords recommend “passive immunisation” if bird flu reaches UK

London Michael Day

In the event of an avian influenza pandemic, doctors may have to collect and pool antibodies from the blood of survivors to treat the seriously ill, says a House of Lords science and technology committee report. Such “passive immunisation” might also slow the spread of infection while the world waits anxiously for a pandemic vaccine, said Lord May, a committee member and former government chief scientific adviser, at the launch of the report on 15 December.

But prompt use of this makeshift vaccination would require ministers to relax the rules on blood products designed to protect the public from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the committee warned. “We’re thinking how we might ask for the rules to be relaxed in a crisis,” Lord May said. The report calls on the government to begin a “risk analysis” of the dangers of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease transmission versus the possible benefits of . . . [Full text of this article]

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