With fears of the virulent swine flu fast turning into a global pandemic a group of scientists here are working hard to develop a vaccine to counter the deadly disease.
Director of World Health Organisation Influenza Centre in North Melbourne, Anne Kelso said her team was already growing the virus from samples taken from New Zealand students who were tested positive, 'The Age' newspaper reported.
"It will take up to 12 weeks for the first doses of a new influenza vaccine to become available to the public," she said.
She said the centre — one of four such research units in the world — would cultivate the virus in fertilised hens' eggs, conduct a series of tests on it and then send it off to companies that manufacture vaccines.
To grow the virus, scientists break a small hole in an egg shell and inject the virus into the chick embryo growing inside.
"The virus is able to grow on the membrane inside the egg. It can grow up to really high concentrations, so each egg becomes a little virus factory," she said.
"Once we've done that, the drug companies will isolate the material from the eggs, purify it and chemically inactivate it so it is no longer a live virus. This means you can't be infected by the vaccine, but are vaccinated with what is effectively broken-up bits of virus," Kelso explained.
If the centre was successful in the process, it would share samples of the virus with other Australian and New Zealand laboratories and any manufacturing company that wants to produce a vaccine, the WHO director said.
Rachel David, a spokeswoman for CSL Biotherapies, which manufactures and markets vaccines, said the company expected to receive three samples of swine flu from Mexico and the US by the end of the week.
She said the company would grow the virus from the samples and also attempt a new method of building the virus from genetic information without any samples.
"You can sequence the genes, write down what is in the strain and then build the virus with genetic material," she said.
"We've never done that before so we will do that and use the traditional method too."
Millions of health declaration cards were distributed to airlines yesterday before any decision to force all inbound passengers to complete them. Thermal scanners, to screen arrivals for high temperatures, were also sent to eight major airports — Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Cairns, the Gold Coast and Darwin.
But the health minister said the Government had not yet decided on the use of the cards or scanners to avoid creating long delays at airports. Health authorities would give expert advice on whether to use both tools, given that "we believe it's a day-by-day, hour-by-hour proposition", she said.