Creating Hen Flu Vaccines for People at a Biosecure Laboratory

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Rapidly, I’m Rachel Feltman. That is the ultimate episode of our three-part sequence on chook flu.

(You’ll be able to take heed to episode one right here and episode two right here.)

On Wednesday we met scientists who’re getting their fingers soiled with dairy cows and poultry to higher perceive how H5N1 chook flu is spreading. Immediately we’ll check out efforts to create vaccines for H5N1—and study why eggs are so essential to the vaccine-making course of.

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Our host as we speak is Naeem Amarsy, a multimedia journalist primarily based in New York Metropolis. Right here’s Naeem now.

Naeem Amarsy: It’s barely 10 A.M. in San Antonio, Texas, and it’s practically 90 levels—in the midst of Might. Whereas the remainder of town steps out in sandals and shorts, I’m watching a crew of scientists at Texas Biomedical Analysis Institute. They’re rummaging via metallic cabinets to search out the additional layers of protecting gear they should begin their day: scrubs, robes, gloves, shoe covers, hairnets and lengthy white coveralls.

Luis Martinez-Sobrido: So, we have to change all our garments. That’s why we’ve got all these cupboards there.

Amarsy: That’s virologist Luis Martinez-Sobrido. He observes with a eager eye as two members of his lab costume up for his or her subsequent shift.

Martinez-Sobrido: You are taking every part out—solely the scrubs and the bunny go well with. In addition they use this head web to cowl the top. I don’t have that downside. I don’t want that [laughs].

Amarsy: Luis’s crew is getting ready to enter a BSL-3—which is brief for biosafety stage three—facility. In these extremely safe labs scientists deal with a number of the world’s probably deadliest viruses.

Martinez-Sobrido: So primarily right here we’re working with tuberculosis, we’re working with SARS-CoV-2 and H5N1.

Amarsy: H5N1 is the explanation I’m right here. As we discovered within the first two episodes of this sequence the virus is shifting between species, from wild birds to their domesticated counterparts to cows and different mammals. And now it’s reached people.

The at present circulating strains have already contaminated dozens of individuals, largely poultry and cattle farmworkers. Fortunately, most of those infections have been delicate. However traditionally, H5N1 viruses have killed practically 50 % of the folks they’ve contaminated, based on the World Well being Group. And that’s a serious concern. The extra these H5N1 viruses flow into, the higher the prospect they modify into types that trigger extreme illness—and that simply unfold between folks.

Martinez-Sobrido: We wouldn’t have any preexisting immunity towards this H5N1 virus, and if it’s capable of transmit, it should probably trigger a pandemic.

Amarsy: I wished to know what virologists like Luis are discovering about chook flu and the way they could attempt to shield us if it does begin leaping between people.

Contained in the anteroom, a sealed area between the surface world and the BSL-3 lab, every of Luis’s colleagues places on their last piece of apparatus: a battery-powered respirator linked to a big white hood with a clear entrance that they name “the bubble.”

Ahmed Elsayed: So we begin with checking our bubble and connecting the battery.

[CLIP: Elsayed’s respirator battery makes a noise as it’s plugged in.]

Elsayed: After which begin the bubble.

[CLIP: Elsayed’s bubble beeps.]

Elsayed: Then we join the shroud that we put to guard our face.

Amarsy: That’s Ahmed Elsayed, a workers scientist working in Luis’s lab. In his immaculate white coveralls he jogs my memory of a beekeeper. In the back of his head a thick cable connects his bubble to the air filter round his belt, it’s a lifeline from any contagion contained in the lab.

Elsayed: We’re ready to have everybody prepared earlier than opening the second door as a result of we can’t open it twice. So as soon as every part is okay then we enter the PIN quantity and enter the lab.

[CLIP: Elsayed types the entry code into the PIN pad. The PIN pad beeps, and the lab’s second door opens and shuts.]

Amarsy: As they disappear into the lab I’m left questioning what Ahmed and his [colleagues] will do over the following six hours of their shift, working with these probably lethal viruses. So I ask Luis.

Martinez-Sobrido: So the principle specialty of our lab is reverse genetic approaches, and reverse genetics primarily check with the power to generate recombinant viruses within the laboratory. It’s not a virus that has been remoted from an animal or from a human.

Amarsy: Recombinant viruses are probably the most highly effective instruments in virology. They let scientists like Luis use genetic sequences to re-create and modify viruses discovered within the wild—all that with out having to depend on samples from the surface world.

This helps researchers check a bunch of issues about viruses akin to H5N1, from how they reply to antiviral therapies to how they mutate and the way sick they’ll make us.

Martinez-Sobrido: Extra importantly, like within the case of the influenza vaccines, can help you generate attenuated types of the virus that then you should use as vaccines for the remedy of viral infections.

Amarsy: Yearly tens of hundreds of thousands of Individuals get a flu shot. This prevents tens of hundreds of hospitalizations. And making the annual seasonal flu vaccines is a coordinated international effort.

The World Well being Group provides suggestions on the vaccines’ make-up twice a yr—in February for the Northern Hemisphere and September for the Southern Hemisphere. They make these suggestions primarily based on which strains specialists assume are almost certainly to unfold. Within the U.S., the Meals and Drug Administration considers that information after which makes its personal suggestions, which pharmaceutical producers use to supply hundreds of thousands of doses which are distributed throughout the nation.

Alongside the best way, labs like Luis’s become involved.

Martinez-Sobrido: Effectively, we generate a number of the shares, or the seeds, of the vaccine. we can’t produce vaccines for a big inhabitants; we simply do it [on a] smaller scale right here.

Amarsy: What Luis calls the “seed” of the vaccine is a particularly designed virus that pharma firms use to develop flu vaccines. It doesn’t make us sick however as a substitute helps our physique create antibodies. It’s also called a candidate vaccine virus.

Amarsy (tape): So if I get a flu shot on the finish of the yr …

Martinez-Sobrido: It might be coming from right here, yeah.

Amarsy: Along with its contribution to your annual flu shot, Luis’s lab makes candidates for potential vaccines to guard towards H5N1. These so-called pandemic vaccine viruses are a necessary line of protection towards the specter of an avian flu pandemic. They can be utilized to create vaccines to assist cut back extreme sickness.

And whether or not we’re speaking about flu pictures for seasonal or avian strains, making them normally includes a shocking software.

Martinez-Sobrido: We infect eggs with the virus.

Amarsy: These aren’t your on a regular basis grocery store eggs. They’re fertilized eggs, produced in secret biosecure farms throughout the nation. It’s believed that we undergo hundreds of thousands of those eggs yearly. They’re used as a result of flu viruses develop very effectively within the allantoic cavity, which is stuffed with a liquid that comprises waste from the embryo in addition to numerous proteins.

Luis and his crew confirmed me how they make H5N1 vaccine seeds. They stated all of it begins of their super-secure BSL-3 lab that solely approved researchers can enter. I can’t go in.

Martinez-Sobrido: So, we normally begin with a vaccine virus that we generate within the laboratory. It doesn’t infect or replicate [in] people, but it surely grows very effectively in eggs.

Amarsy: As soon as the scientists create the virus they conduct a bunch of exams to ensure it truly isn’t harmful to people. Solely after they know the virus is secure do they transfer it to a different lab with much less stringent security guidelines—no want for respirators—and this time I may be a part of.

Martinez-Sobrido: We’ve egg incubators like these the place we hold the eggs inside, and so they truly rotate, like, each quarter-hour, 20 minutes.

[CLIP: The incubator rotating.]

Amarsy: Ahmed removes a dozen white eggs from the incubator and turns off the ceiling lights.

Elsayed: So we get the egg at day one, so then we hold it till day 10, [when] the embryo shall be prepared and the egg shall be prepared for an infection to propagate the viruses. So now we are going to begin to candle the egg.

Amarsy: He holds an egg in a single hand. He strikes the egg under a small gentle hooked up to his workstation, inflicting it to glow orange—aside from a small round patch on the prime, which stays white. That’s the air sac, he explains. He desires to keep away from injecting the virus there as a result of it gained’t develop.

[CLIP: Elsayed marks an egg’s air sac.]

Elsayed: Then we discover [a] sure level through which we will use to inoculate safely the embryonated egg with out affecting the embryo.

Amarsy: After labeling a dozen eggs Ahmed turns the lights again on. He passes the crate to Ramya Smithaveni Barre, a Ph.D. pupil who additionally works in Luis’s lab.

Ramya Smithaveni Barre: We’ll truly be making a gap right here on the level, and we shall be injecting the virus into the allantoic fluid.

Amarsy: Underneath a loud biosafety hood she pokes small holes into the eggs and injects them with the specifically designed vaccine virus.

Barre: These are 18-gauge needles. These are very thick, so it simply helps drill a gap rapidly. So simply make a gap right here. So that you see this level right here, which—the place the X mark is made? So from right here we shall be injecting utilizing a syringe.

[CLIP: Barre opens a syringe packet and injects virus into an egg.]

Barre: So after that is executed I’ll mainly be masking them with the glue to seal them…. So after that they go into the incubator, and so they keep there for, like, 48 hours.

Amarsy: Now that the eggs have been contaminated the crew wants to attend for the virus to propagate in giant sufficient portions. In two days they are going to extract the allantoic fluid, which now comprises the virus, conduct various exams and put the samples with the best virus focus into vials. Every has sufficient virus to make hundreds of flu vaccine doses.

After leaving Luis’s lab the vials undergo a sequence of high quality management evaluations and testing. After which they’ll be despatched to manufacturing labs, which, within the case of a pandemic, can use them to copy the method in hundreds of thousands of eggs.

Martinez-Sobrido: Since it is a virus that’s nonetheless alive the following factor they do after rising the virus is to kill the virus, inactivate the virus. So as soon as they inactivate the virus they course of [it], after which they put it within the tube, after which they ship it to the pharmacy, and that’s what you get.

Amarsy: For the 2024–2025 flu season the CDC stated it anticipated about 80 % of flu vaccines within the U.S. to be made utilizing the egg-based methodology. And with out the science that has—even when most individuals don’t realize it—gone into each flu shot you’ve ever had, we would not be capable to put together for what scientists say is the rising menace of a possible chook flu pandemic.

Martinez-Sobrido: We not too long ago are conscious of how essential the vaccines are due to the COVID-19 pandemic, proper? That these vaccines have clearly saved hundreds of thousands of lives. However, clearly [this] is the very best mechanism that we’ve got to guard us towards any kind of infectious illness, together with influenza.

Amarsy: And if H5N1 does change into simply transmissible between people, the seeds that Luis’s lab makes and the H5N1 vaccines that comply with, may change into central to our pandemic response.

Amesh Adalja: So there are stockpiled vaccines towards H5N1. It is a course of that started throughout George W. Bush’s administration. These aren’t well-matched to what’s circulating now, however there have been efforts to replace that stockpile.

There’s not sufficient within the stockpile at present to vaccinate your entire U.S. inhabitants. There are efforts underway to extend that stockpile if wanted, and there are contracts in place to have the ability to do this. Within the occasion of a menace change you’ll anticipate producers coming on-line and a number of the seasonal flu capability being shifted to pandemic flu necessities.

Amarsy: That’s Amesh Adalja. He’s a pandemic-preparedness specialist at Johns Hopkins College and an infectious illness doctor.

Amesh emphasizes the significance of vaccines as considered one of our first traces of protection towards a possible avian influenza pandemic. However he sees some challenges in our present system.

Adalja: The problem will all the time be: Does the vaccine work very effectively? Is it well-matched to what—the pressure that’s circulating or that’s inflicting the problem? And the way a lot of it do we’ve got, and how briskly can we’ve got it within the arms of these people who find themselves at most danger?

Amarsy: A part of what complicates addressing these issues is using hen eggs, he says.

Adalja: For those who’re in an avian influenza outbreak, it’d have an effect on hen farms and hen egg manufacturing. Nonetheless, folks acknowledge that, and there have been particular flocks which have been segregated away and saved below excessive biosafety to not permit them to be contaminated. They’re not saved in [the] open, the place a passing goose can’t put its droppings within the hen cage. The people that should work together with them should put on aggressive private protecting gear.

Amarsy: So to specialists like Amesh, threats to egg availability aren’t the principle downside. The bigger concern is that creating vaccines by utilizing hen eggs takes so lengthy that scientists have to select the strains about six months earlier than a vaccine will get into our arms.

Adalja: And that creates an issue as a result of after they’re making that pressure choice, issues may change later within the season, and so they’re just about caught with what they picked. In order that’s why we generally have vaccine mismatches: due to that lengthy lead time required by the egg-based vaccine producers.

Amarsy: Because of this if the H5N1 viruses at present circulating have been to mutate into a brand new pressure that doesn’t reply to the vaccine seeds made in labs like Luis’s, it could be no less than half a yr earlier than we even had egg-based pictures obtainable. By that point many individuals may already be contaminated.

Moreover, Amesh says there’s one other downside with rising chook flu vaccines in eggs.

Adalja: Once you propagate the virus in hen eggs, the virus mutates and also you may find yourself on the finish with one thing totally different than what you began with that may not work as effectively, so I feel it additionally decreases the efficacy.

So, lengthy lead time, which permits mismatches to happen extra continuously, and also you get egg-based mutations that lower the efficacy of the vaccine.

Amarsy: As talked about earlier than we nonetheless use eggs to make most flu pictures, and more often than not it really works effectively. It’s the most cost effective choice, and we’ve got a widespread manufacturing infrastructure constructed round this course of. However there are additionally faster alternate options, like cell-based vaccines, that are grown in mammalian cells. And although these approaches price extra proper now, specialists like Amesh have advocated for them to be adopted extra extensively.

Some labs try to develop even newer options primarily based on messenger RNA, like most of the COVID vaccines. This course of may permit nations to deploy a vaccine that matches a brand new pressure a lot faster. The Trump administration, nevertheless, not too long ago canceled $766 million in funding for the pharmaceutical firm Moderna to develop an mRNA-based chook flu shot. This has added to issues in regards to the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Providers’ method to vaccination.

However for H5N1 to set off the following pandemic it could want to accumulate the power to simply transmit between people. And that, we predict, hasn’t occurred but.

Adolfo García-Sastre: We’ve these little entities, microscopic entities, viruses—flu has solely eight genes, eight genes, and so they get inside a cell of an organism that—we’ve got [about] 30,000 genes. And the way [is] the virus … capable of—these eight genes [able to] code info that take over the entire 30,000 genes after which change utterly the cell to make copies of themselves? How will you obtain that with so little info, proper? That’s fascinating.

Amarsy: That’s Adolfo García-Sastre. He’s one of many world’s main flu virologists, and he educated Luis again within the 2000s. He now runs a lab on the Mount Sinai Icahn College of Drugs in New York Metropolis.

His lab appears to be like at just about every part that has to do with flu—vaccination, therapies, viral evolution, transmission, mutations—however even he was shocked by what H5N1 has executed.

García-Sastre: I may by no means think about in my life that there shall be cows contaminated with flu…. Earlier than that they are saying, “You assume that flu can replicate and set up a cycle in dairy cows by replicating within the mammary glands of the dairy cows?” I say, “What, are you loopy or what?”

Amarsy: As we heard my colleague Meghan Bartels clarify in Episode Two, scientists have been astonished after they discovered that H5N1 had jumped from birds to cows. And now the massive concern is that the virus manages to adapt effectively sufficient to our our bodies to transmit effectively between folks.

A technique that would occur is thru reassortment, the genetic mixing of a number of influenza viruses that we discovered about in episode one.

García-Sastre: So if we get, for instance, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic of flu, … it [had acquired] gene chromosomes coming from 4 totally different viruses: one was a virus circulating in people, the opposite was a virus circulating in birds, the opposite virus circulating in pigs and the opposite virus circulating in pigs however [in] a special geographical space. So by some means these viruses acquired collectively right into a pig after which created this specific virus.

Amarsy: One other manner H5N1 may develop the power to maneuver from human to human is by merely mutating. Mutations occur when viruses make copies of themselves and errors slip in. More often than not the mutations that don’t profit the virus are much less more likely to move down.

García-Sastre: However it may possibly occur that if a brand new mutation offers you a brand new attribute that makes you extra more likely to replicate sooner than your earlier brothers and [sisters], then this mutation dominates.

Now, let’s say H5N1, if it requires 20 totally different mutations to copy and transmit in people and if every mutation by itself doesn’t make it higher, that could be very uncommon as a result of these 20 mutations, it’s very troublesome [for them to] occur on the identical time. But when it requires solely 4 mutations, that’s a special story. Perhaps you will get 4 mutations being [generated] at one second and it simply [happens] to be that this—there’s a human that will get contaminated with this mutant virus; then it begins to propagate in people.

Amarsy: There’s an ongoing debate amongst virologists about what number of mutations it could take for the H5N1 viruses we’re at present coping with to higher adapt to people. One examine discovered that for the pressure that has been circulating in dairy cows since final yr, one single mutation may probably do the job. Right here’s what Adolfo needed to say.

García-Sastre: It is not possible as a result of I feel the variety of encounters of this virus with people has been so many who if it [would] be just one mutation required for [transmissibility] in people, it could have occurred already.

Amarsy: Flu pandemics are traditionally very uncommon. However there’s one notable exception: specialists consider that in 1918 an H1N1 virus thought to have avian origins mutated in a manner that made it higher tailored to people. Finally, the virus prompted one of many deadliest pandemics in recorded historical past, with estimates suggesting it killed wherever from 50 to 100 million folks worldwide.

In 2005 Adolfo was a part of a crew that re-created this virus within the lab. And right here’s what they discovered.

García-Sastre: So 1918 was all the time a, a thriller and a hypothesis [among] flu researchers. We realized that the virus was a really nasty virus to begin with, and most of the deaths occurred as a result of that was an excessive case of a really virulent virus for people of influenza. And that implies that this may occur once more, however will it occur once more?

After we began to attempt to perceive what are the determinants of virulence of this virus, we discovered that it wanted to have an ideal storm—a mixture of a number of mutations occurring in a number of genes of the virus—and solely this mixture makes the virus as deadly because it was.

Amarsy: Simply within the final roughly 140 years there have been 5 flu pandemics, starting from the disastrous 1918 pandemic to the comparatively delicate 2009 outbreak. Virologists are inclined to agree that one other flu pandemic is inevitable. However there’s disagreement about how doubtless H5N1 is to be the set off, so I requested Adolfo’s longtime colleagues what they thought.

Peter Palese: Some folks assume that it’s only a query of time when any of those H5 … they’re certain to, to leap into people. I flip it round and say, “They’ve been with us so lengthy already, in every kind of animals—avian, mammalian—why hasn’t it occurred?” And so I’m not so certain it should occur, proper? And I’m not so certain that that is the following pandemic pressure, which is able to trigger us all of the grief, which we’ve got seen with different pandemic strains.

Amarsy: That’s Peter Palese, Adolfo’s mentor at Mount Sinai, and a number one determine behind numerous improvements in influenza analysis.

Florian Krammer: I feel it’s actually laborious to foretell. You already know, folks have been saying this might change into a pandemic in 1997, in 2003 and since then fairly often, proper? I feel there’s a excessive probability proper now, or increased than earlier than, simply because there’s a lot virus on the market and since it appears to adapt to mammals higher.

Amarsy: And that’s Florian Krammer, who additionally works with Adolfo and Peter at Mount Sinai.

García-Sastre: What is admittedly clear is that there’s gonna be one other flu pandemic—doesn’t must be H5, however there have been, on a regular basis, pandemics.

Amarsy: It’s not a foregone conclusion that H5N1 will set off the following pandemic. But when it does, are we prepared to reply successfully?

I talked to epidemiologists Jennifer Nuzzo and Shira Doron. Right here’s what they instructed me.

Jennifer Nuzzo: So traditionally, H5N1 has been noticed to be probably the most lethal viruses we’ve seen. Which means that of all of the instances we’ve been capable of finding, about half of them have died, and that’s really extraordinary whenever you type of rank pathogens by way of their potential to kill the people who we all know are contaminated.

Amarsy: That’s Jennifer. She directs the Pandemic Heart at Brown College.

Shira Doron: That has not been the case with the present pressure. What we’ve seen with this specific pressure could be very delicate sickness, and so usually what we’re seeing with the people who’ve developed H5N1 influenza from cows and poultry is simply conjunctivitis, or simply conjunctivitis with some delicate higher respiratory signs, like a sore throat.

Amarsy: And that’s Shira. She’s the chief an infection management officer at Tufts Drugs.

From the start of the present outbreak to early June 2025 there have been 70 recognized human instances of H5N1 in america. And although most instances have been delicate we made be undercounting them—by rather a lot.

Doron: We all know that our recognized instances are a comparatively small proportion of complete precise instances, particularly as a result of the illness has been so delicate in many of the farmworkers who’ve change into contaminated. Most individuals with very delicate an infection don’t go to the physician and don’t request testing. Add to that the truth that many of those employees are undocumented migrants who’re attempting to remain below the radar.

Amarsy: If many instances go undetected, it implies that H5N1 might be spreading silently. And each time it infects a brand new individual it will get an opportunity to mutate, probably right into a type that adapts higher to our our bodies.

Nuzzo: I feel it’s fairly regarding that we proceed to see new outbreaks on farms being reported and but no new human instances have been recognized in months. So the variety of animals who’re getting contaminated continues to climb, and by some means the variety of people who find themselves being contaminated has simply remained unchanged. We’re additionally seeing that the quantity of exams that states are doing has decreased. So we’ve got numerous cause to be involved that we haven’t discovered new instances as a result of there’s been a contraction within the surveillance efforts directed at H5N1.

There could also be decrease H5N1 exercise; I’m not ruling that out. However we additionally know that H5N1 isn’t going away.

Amarsy: So in an effort to keep forward of the curve Jennifer says we’d must ramp up our monitoring efforts, from testing for potential infections to conducting wastewater surveillance. We’d additionally must do far more to guard those that are most uncovered to the virus.

Nuzzo: We all know simply telling folks to put on private protecting gear to guard themselves towards the virus each time they’re round animals isn’t working as a result of folks have continued to get sick regardless of making these suggestions. So, I do assume there’s a case to be made to supply the vaccines that we do should the agricultural sector—not mandate however provide—as one other software to guard them.

Amarsy: In any other case, we might be caught off guard.

Nuzzo: H5N1 might be rather a lot much less extreme and nonetheless trigger an amazing quantity of chaos and injury. You already know, COVID-19 has [been] noticed to be far much less deadly than what we’ve noticed H5N1 to be. And if H5N1 turned capable of infect folks simply and capable of transmit simply between folks, thus triggering a pandemic, and something near the case fatality that we’ve seen it have, it could be far and away a lot worse than something we’ve ever noticed with COVID-19.

Amarsy: In fact, that’s a situation no person desires. But when it occurred, it’s not like we’d be taking pictures at midnight.

As we discovered from Luis we will make vaccines which are considered efficient, no less than towards the present circulating strains of H5N1. Moreover, we’ve got antiviral therapies, a few of which researchers akin to Adolfo and Peter have examined towards the nastiest flu viruses, together with viruses with genes from the 1918 pressure, and so they are inclined to work effectively towards many various flu viruses.

So what appears to concern epidemiologists akin to Jennifer and Shira essentially the most isn’t whether or not we’ve got the fitting therapies and prevention mechanisms obtainable to struggle chook flu. As a substitute, the query is whether or not we’ve got sufficient sources proper now to deal with one other pandemic.

Doron: We’ve examined various methods and found out the right way to do some actually laborious issues, and people are triggers we may pull once more if want be. So for instance, in my hospital, we now know the right way to arrange, in a short time, a mass testing website, a mass vaccination website. We all know the right way to broaden intensive care and broaden affected person care, so in some methods we’re extra ready as we speak due to COVID-19.

Amarsy: However in different methods we’re much less ready, the specialists say.

Nuzzo: The factor that I’m most nervous about is the lack of skilled personnel. In the course of the begin of COVID-19 one of many issues that states tried to do was contact tracing, but it surely was actually laborious as a result of states didn’t have the form of personnel. So there was an enormous, fast effort to attempt to construct that personnel. Not solely will we not have that workforce anymore, however we’ve additionally misplaced numerous public well being leaders. You already know, it’s like we had an infinite hearth rip via the U.S. and we determined to systematically dismantle the entire hearth departments. So I’m deeply nervous about how the U.S. would fare in one other pandemic.

Amarsy: Jennifer says that eventually there shall be one other flu pandemic. Whether or not it will likely be attributable to H5N1 or one other chook flu virus, we simply don’t know. However the best way we put together as we speak, from the vaccine seeds in-built labs like Luis’s to the essential analysis performed by Adolfo to the care administered in Shira’s hospital, will decide how sturdy our response is—and whether or not the following outbreak will upend our world.

Feltman: That’s all for as we speak’s episode. We hope you’ve loved this week’s particular sequence on chook flu. We’ll be again with one thing new on Monday.

Science Rapidly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, together with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and hosted by Naeem Amarsy and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our present. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Particular due to Laura Petersen and Catie Corcoran on the Texas Biomedical [Research] Institute; Jane Deng and Elizabeth Dowling on the Mount Sinai Icahn College of Drugs; and Kimberly Lau, Dean Visser and Jeanna Bryner at Scientific American. Subscribe to Scientific American for extra up-to-date and in-depth science information.

For Science Rapidly, that is Rachel Feltman. Have a fantastic weekend.