Britain is testing a vaccine that would protect humans from a potential bird flu pandemic.
The first volunteers have been immunised with the vaccine in a large-scale trial that will involve 4 000 people in England, Scotland and the United States.
“The vaccine targets the H5N1 flu strain which has caused devastating infections in bird populations worldwide and has spread to some mammals,” the BBC reported.
The threat to humans is currently low, says the UK Health Protection Agency, with almost all human cases linked to close contact with infected animals.
The vaccine uses the same mRNA technology used in current Covid jabs, with scientists saying this enables the vaccine to be created quickly and at scale, in the event of a pandemic.
The bird flu virus can be deadly for humans. There have been around 1 000 confirmed human cases reported to the World Health Organization since 2003 and nearly half of those proved fatal, the BBC said.
There have been multiple incidents worldwide of bird flu affecting mammals, usually predators that eat sick or dead birds. They include seals, bears, cats, dogs and foxes. However there have also been infections of sheep, goats and dairy cattle.
This has led to warnings of a rising threat of bird flu infections among humans.
