Kazakh Scientists Developing Bird Flu Vaccine

Excerpt from report by Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency

Almaty, 21 March: A bird flu vaccine is being developed in Kazakhstan.

“The Kazakh agricultural research institute in Otar (town in Zhambyl Region) is developing a vaccine,” Academician Marat Sayatov, a representative of the virology institute, said at a news conference in Almaty on Tuesday [21 March]. Sayatov did not disclose the preliminary results of the vaccine development.

But Kazakh Health Minister Yerbolat Dosayev, speaking in Parliamentary Hour on Monday [20 March], said that it would now be better for Kazakhstan to buy the bird flu vaccine [from abroad], instead of developing it itself, “because its development is a very long process”.

In future, however, these tasks (of developing the vaccine) will be fulfilled by a planned National Biotechnology Centre in Astana, which will be built in the coming two years, the minister said.

[Passage omitted: background information on the bird flu virus]