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BEIJING, Dec 26 (Reuters): China will begin mass- production of a new bird flu vaccine for poultry by the end of the month that could also help in the development of a vaccine to protect people, state media said Monday.
The live vaccine, which will also work against another poultry disease, Newcastle disease, can be delivered orally, nasally or by spraying and will cost a fifth of existing inactivated vaccines, the newspaper said.
Standard flu shots are inactivated, meaning the virus is killed, but live vaccines contain weakened forms of the live virus.
There have been 141 confirmed human cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, all of them in Asia, including six in China.
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