‘Hilton’ Chickens Are Essential to Stave Off Pandemic

(Bloomberg) -- Workers at Kinross Farm defended its hens against the worst wildfires in Australian history while their own homes burned. Now the birds may return the favor by protecting humans from swine flu.

The hens, housed in air-conditioned sheds and kept in shape with a vitamin-rich diet, blood tests and doctors’ visits, lay eggs critical to the creation of a new vaccine. It’s needed to foil the flu virus that may prompt the World Health Organization to declare the first pandemic since 1968.

Seasonal flu causes 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally, and a pandemic strain might kill millions, according to WHO officials. The hens are essential because the most common way of making a protective vaccine involves growing viruses in the chickens’ eggs, said Philip Szepe, the owner of Kinross.

“These are very pampered birds, very important birds,” said Szepe, whose farm is in Kinglake, a town about 70 kilometers (44 miles) northeast of Melbourne. “It’s as close as you would get in the poultry world to a Hilton.”

CSL Ltd., a Kinross customer in Melbourne, is counting on eggs with the size, shape and shell thickness needed to grow the virus crucial to making vaccines. Egg suppliers around the world are standing by to send shipments to vaccine makers. All await word on whether world health officials will formally endorse the production of a shot against swine flu.

Black Saturday

Kinross’s birds, a mix of Hy-Line Brown and Hisex Brown breeds, almost went up in smoke in January during the Black Saturday fires, which killed 173 people in Victoria, the state that includes Kinglake. Two Kinross workers were fighting flames at the 620-acre (251-hectare) property, unaware that their own homes were among those burning, Szepe said.

The farm declines to disclose how many of its 600,000 hens make eggs for vaccines and thus get coddling not given others. Szepe, who also wouldn’t discuss egg prices, said the farm produces about 1 million eggs annually for vaccine, including 800,000 for CSL.

Under current global capacity, vaccine makers would be capable of producing 2.5 billion shots within 12 months of receiving a pandemic virus strain, requiring four years to meet global demand, according to a best-case scenario published in a February report by Oliver Wyman, a management consulting company based in New York.

Demand for vaccine will outstrip availability when a pandemic starts, and alternative technologies that don’t require ramping up supplies of chickens and eggs aren’t being embraced rapidly enough, said David Fedson, a former vaccine developer for Paris-based Sanofi Aventis SA.

‘In a Bind’

“We’re going to be in a bind,” said Fedson, now an independent specialist in pandemic preparedness. “People who have been talking about the potential for using inactivated vaccines for the world simply haven’t done their arithmetic.”

So-called inactivated vaccines contain viruses that have been killed, yet contain parts of the pathogen that prompt the body to mount an immune response.

Fedson urges the use of so-called live attenuated vaccines, such as MedImmune Inc.’s Flumist, which contain weakened forms of the live virus. These require less virus to achieve the same effect, so production is faster, he said.

There have been 5,728 laboratory-confirmed swine flu cases, in 33 countries, according to WHO data posted today. The death toll stood at 61, including 56 in Mexico.

1931 Breakthrough

In 1931, the scientists Ernest William Goodpasture and Alice Miles Woodruff invented methods for using eggs to cultivate viruses. Fertilized eggs are injected with a virus, which needs a living cell to grow. The virus is then extracted, purified and killed -- for jabbing into humans, where it can boost the immune system without causing disease.

One egg can produce roughly one shot, said Hiroshi Hashimoto, a spokesman for Kitasato Institute Research Center for Biologicals, in Saitama, Japan. Eggs are heated for two days at 37 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) for culturing after a virus gets injected in 11-day-old eggs at a laboratory at Kitasato.

While production methods have since been developed that entail neither eggs nor live virus, CSL is relying on the old technology.

“It’s the cheapest, safest and most effective way to respond in an emergency,” said Rachel David, a CSL spokeswoman.

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