Prominent U.S. Tuberculosis Expert and One Health Leader Dies
Dr. Charles O. Thoen, a veterinarian internationally recognized for his extensive knowledge and expertise in the scientific field of tuberculosis and an avid One Health leader/advocate died unexpectedly Monday, 8 May 2017. A fitting in memoriam to him is this pertinent article.Dr. Thoen was a strong ally of the One Health Initiative Autonomous Pro Bono team.

Heterologous prime-boost vaccination with H3N2 influenza viruses of swine favors cross-clade antibody responses and protection

New findings challenge the traditional policy of replacing old strains in existing human influenza vaccines with recent variants with only minimal changes.

Influenza viruses are constantly changing their hemagglutinin (HA) protein, which is the major component of flu vaccines. Current flu vaccines are only effective against virus strains that match the vaccine strains. Consequently, the strains in the human flu vaccines are updated every few years, based on recommendations by the World Health Organization. The situation is even more complex in swine, because of multiple co-circulating and geographically separated swine flu strains. None of the available swine flu vaccines can protect against all these strains.

Pigs and humans need several doses of killed influenza vaccine in order to provide immunity: a “priming” dose is followed by booster vaccinations with the same or very similar vaccine strains. Kristien Van Reeth, of Belgium’s Ghent University, and collaborators are comparing different vaccines and vaccination strategies in swine, which are used as a model for humans. They obtained promising results by priming and boosting pigs with virus strains with very distinct HA proteins. Read the article in NPJ Vaccines

Scientific colloquium on heterologous prime-boost vaccination, organized by the One Health Platform
You are kindly invited to join other academics, public health professionals and regulatory agency officials at the first colloquium on heterologous prime-boost vaccination in Leuven, Belgium, on29 September 2017.