Farms may not be using 'right vaccines'

HONG KONG: The re-emergence of bird flu in Asia and Egypt was partly because poultry farms were not using the right vaccines and that the virus is mutating, experts said yesterday.

Guan Yi, of the University of Hong Kong and an expert on H5N1 virus, warned that poultry farms in some parts of the world were using vaccines that did not provide full protection against the H5N1 and can't keep up with its mutation process.

"The vaccine (used in Hong Kong) was made to fight an American strain of the H5N2, and it is very different from the Guangdong strain of the H5N1 virus here," he said.