All Nature’s pandemic flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.

Human tests of two swine flu vaccines have begun in Australia.

The companies CSL and Vaxine have both begun tests on their products today, according to a number of news sources. CSL is running tests on 240 healthy adult volunteers while Vaxine has 300.

One group in the CSL trial will get one dose, while a second group will get two doses, on the basis that if just one does protects then there will be more vaccine to go round.

“The fundamental data that we and others around the world are interested in are the immune response to the first and second dose,” says Andrew Cuthbertson, CSL’s chief scientific officer (Bloomberg).

CSL expects the trial to take about seven months but says it will have enough data by September to allow the Australian government to start planning how to use the vaccine, allowing distribution in October (ABC News, AP).

The results will be carefully scrutinised by all players in the H1N1 vaccine business.

“The world will be watching to see the immunogenicity results of this first clinical trial,” says Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO’s initiative for vaccine research (various, eg: Sydney Morning Herald). “It is likely to be indicative of how the other vaccine candidates will perform.”

Novartis, Sanofi and GSK also plan to start trials in the next few weeks or months. David Low, a health-care analyst at Deutsche Bank AG in Sydney, told Bloomberg most companies already had orders to supply vaccines so being first to trial is “probably more of a PR coup” than anything else.