A high-security laboratory has created a prototype bird flu, the first step toward making a human vaccine against the potentially deadly new virus, a World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman said on Thursday. The WHO will give the prototype virus next week to three drug makers who have expressed interest in producing small sample vaccine batches and carrying out clinical trials, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said. The clinical trials are expected to take several months, but large-scale vaccine production would only begin if a deadly pandemic broke out, he added.
