The bird flu solved by vaccines, now comes the swine flu.

Pandemics shaped the human population in past and probably in future. One of the most destructive influenza pandemics in the last century was the Spanish Flu which caused the death of 25-40 million people. More info about the pandemics here. The very last thread to cause a pandemic is the virus called A/H1N1, or swine flu, or Mexican flu.

Rapid diagnostic tests will be probably be PCR based. A very interesting microarray based virus characterization tool is described here.

Influenza vaccines are produced by quite a lot of manufacturers in the world. You can have a list of the manufacturers here.

A small Hungarian company is a word leader in vaccine development. Omninvest was one of the first who produced the anti H5N1 vaccine. It is good to draw the conclusions of the Bird Flu vaccine development, a detailed overview can be found here.

Today Omninvest announced that they made all the preparatory steps needed to start to develop a Swine Flu vaccine. Once the sample virus arrives they can start the development of inactivated viruses that can be used for the development of the Swine flu vaccine. While US based CDC researcher Ruben Donis announced that the “reference strain” would be available at the beginning of May, the Hungarian news agency MTI released the information that samples that could be used for further development migh arrive in days.

For more details about the life of a virus and vaccination check this.