Despite a cooling of interest by the media, Tadataka Yamada, Alice Dautry and Mark Walport emphasize in a Nature Commentary (454, 162; 2008), that a vaccine stockpile may be invaluable for preventing an avian-influenza (H5N1) outbreak in humans from quickly becoming a pandemic, and urge the vaccine research and development community not to become complacent about this important issue. Although their respective institutions — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Pasteur Institute and the Wellcome Trust — are working with other parties to develop new resources and collaborative opportunities to provide vaccines where they may be needed most (the developing world), the authors say a wider community response is also needed.

In a related Commentary in the same issue (Nature 454, 160; 2008), Steven Salzberg calls for greater transparency in the viral-strain selection process for the human influenza vaccine. The vaccine for the 2007–2008 season failed for predictable and, says Salzberg, avoidable reasons. If the process remains closed, and researchers are denied access to sequencing data used in the selection process, future vaccine failures could be more dramatic and deadly.

There is a related (free access) Editorial in the same issue of the journal, The long war against ’flu (Nature 454, 137; 2008).

What do you think? Can a pre-pandemic vaccine curb a major catastrophe? And are the cooperative attitudes that Yamada, Dautry and Walport advocate exactly the kinds of things that are lacking from efforts to develop seasonal flu vaccines? These questions and others are being discussed online at the Nature Network Opinion forum, in which Steven Salzberg, author of one of the Nature Commentaries, writes: “What our governments can and should do is launch a crash program to create vaccines using non-egg based methods. This could allow us to get a new vaccine – if a pandemic strain appears – into production in a matter of weeks. In the meanwhile, we just have to hope that a pandemic doesn’t happen.” Join the conversation at Nature Network.