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The Australian National University (ANU) and the Chinese government will join forces to establish a research facility to find an effective treatments for avian influenza (bird flu).
Avian influenza A H5N1 viruses. The Australian National University (ANU) and the Chinese government will join forces to establish a research facility to find an effective treatments for avian influenza (bird flu). Photo: Cynthia Goldsmith, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The $AU3 million ($US2.72 million) research facility will be opened at the John Curtin School for Medical Research at the ANU in Canberra with both the Chinese and Australian contributing half of the costs.
“The funding will be used to study alterations in the genome code that lead to increased resistance to Avian Influenza,” said the ANU's Dr Edward Bertram, who instigated the project during his work in a China-Australia exchange programme. “It’s hoped that this work will help us to identify targets for designing new treatments to boost the immune system against Avian Influenza.”
Dr Bertram will lead the Australian team with Professor Hong Tang, Director of the Centre for Infection and Immunity, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Professor Hualen Chen, Director of the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory in Harbin leading the Chinese researchers, according to an ANU press release.
Dr Bertram told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the virus had proven to have a high fatality rate and his team were looking to produce an effective vaccine.
"The latest outbreak has been in Indonesia with a very high rate of fatality and so if avian flu does mutate for ease of human to human spread it wouldn't take too much for the virus to get into Australia," he said.
"So we need to have a number of measures to prevent this and I think this project is just one aspect of trying to identify ways that we can help with fighting bird flu."
"This project really is a new area of investigation, so we're really trying to look at alternations in the genome of individuals that can enhance resistance to avian flu, which may give us leads to developing specific therapies that we could incorporate into vaccine designed to fight bird flu," he said.
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