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- MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Australian
scientists are researching putting a measles gene into genetically modified
food to provide an alternative to traditional vaccination against the virus.
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- Alfred Hospital infectious disease unit director Stephen
Wesselingh said a research team had successfully created measles modified
tobacco and was now putting the gene into lettuce.
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- ``We started with tobacco just because it is very easy
to work with and grows quickly, and we mashed up the leaves and fed them
to mice. Now we are moving into lettuce and rice,'' he told Reuters.
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- ``We have been working on it for the past two or three
years and we have been getting positive results for the last six months
or so.''
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- Wesselingh said the research by the Alfred team and the
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) would
provide a cheaper vaccine, that avoided using needles and which didn't
need to be kept at cold temperatures.
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- ``That is not a problem in Australia, but in the countries
where measles is a big problem, in Africa etc, keeping the vaccine cold
can sometimes be a major difficulty,'' he said.
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- The researchers are looking to use crops where existing
genetically modified organism research has already been successfully conducted.
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- Wesselingh said in the tobacco experiments the H protein
of the measles virus was placed in the plant.
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- ``The plant is then making all its normal leaves and
things, but it is also making this extra protein,'' he said.
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- ``When we feed the leaves of that plant to mice, those
mice then develop antibodies against the H protein, which is part of the
measles virus so those antibodies then protect against measles as well.''
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- Rice Offers Potential
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- Wesselingh said rice offered great potential as the measles
vaccination could be used in rice flour milk produced for children who
are not covered by the current measles vaccination.
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- Release of measles modified food was still a ``long way
down the track,'' he said, with trials in people likely to start sometime
in the next five years.
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- Wesselingh said the modified food would be treated as
a medical product and would not be available for mass consumption.
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- ``These crops wouldn't be generally released. You would
make them in special areas and then distribute them in the same way you
would distribute other vaccines,'' he said. ``I think that would allay
a lot of the GM-type fears.''
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- Similar research has also been conducted in the United
States for hepatitis B and cholera and the Melbourne-based team is starting
to look at genetic modification for the HIV virus, which can lead to AIDS.
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- Wesselingh said the Melbourne research had focused on
measles as it was still a major health problem in the developing world.
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- ``About a million children still die of measles each
year and most of those are under the age of one and the current vaccine
doesn't work in very young children,'' he said.
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- ``We felt that an oral vaccine that could work in very
young children might be a way to arrest that problem.''
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