Green Monkey Rumors Keep Some Parents From Vaccinating Children For H1N1
KLIV and ABC News are reporting that there are rumors spreading that the H1N1 vaccine was made from monkey brains or that it was derived from green monkey genes. KLIV says only 52% of parents at an elementary school in San Jose agreed to let their children get free H1N1 vaccine shots being offered by the school district. The strange and false rumors may have something to do with parents not wanting their children to get the vaccine.
Green monkeys are a real species of monkey that live in Africa. The H1N1 vaccine has nothing to do with green monkeys or monkey brains. It was cultivated from a seed strain using the H1N1 virus found in humans and is grown in chicken eggs by vaccine manufacturers. The initial seed strain did not work well for growing the virus so some companies recently switched to another seed strain in the hopes this would produce better yields of the virus so the vaccine could be make more quickly. All the seed strains used were found in humans not monkeys.
There are companies looking for quicker methods to grow H1N1 vaccine. Bloomberg is reporting that one company is trying to grow virus in caterpillar ovary cells to speed up vaccine production. They are currently trying to win backing from a U.S. panel. Another company makes a flu vaccine called Optaflu which uses a mammalian cell line, instead of chicken eggs, for vaccine production. They don't say what kind of mammalian cells are used. The company says this technique creates a vaccine that "more closely matches the original 'wild' virus." Optaflu has been approved in Europe but not in the U.S.
