A researcher said Friday field trials could begin in about a year on a vaccine for the Army to combat hantavirus in parts of Asia - but that vaccine probably wouldn't fight a separate hantavirus that has killed 27 people in the United States.
In any case, the military won't be the one to develop a vaccine against a U.S. hantavirus strain because the disease here doesn't pose a real threat to soldiers, said Connie Schmaljohn, chief of the department of molecular virology for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland.Schmaljohn was among a dozen speakers Friday morning in the opening session of a two-day conference here on Hantaviral Disease: Prevention and Management.
She said a vaccine the research institute has ready for clinical trials in January probably wouldn't protect against U.S. hantavirus strains.
But Schmaljohn said there could be promise for U.S. researchers in a second vaccine the institute is working on for a hantavirus strain known as puumala.
The puumala vaccine could be ready for field trials in Russia in two to three years, she said after the session.
And Schmaljohn said researchers outside the institute could use its work as the basis for developing a vaccine for U.S. hantavirus strains.
The military has worked for years to come up with a vaccine against hantaviruses because the viruses are considered a threat to U.S. military personnel overseas. Hantaviruses, found most commonly in places such as China and Korea, cause 200,000 cases of renal failure with hemorrhagic fever worldwide each year, Schmaljohn said.