Bovine and human-derived passive immunization could help slow a future avian influenza pandemic.

An epidemic of human transmitted avian influenza could have casualties on a scale seen in the great Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. This paper proposes that should such occur before effective vaccines and antiviral drugs are available, the outbreak could be significantly slowed by consumption of raw milk produced by herds of pathogen-free lactating cows intranasally inoculated with heat-sterilized sputa pooled from avian influenza patients, supplemented by parenteral serum immune globulin from the same cows. Efficiency of bovine antibody production could be enhanced using cholera toxin subunit b, and milk production could be rapidly accelerated using recombinant bovine somatotropin hormone. In this way, it would be possible to quickly create and distribute large quantities of milk-based and serum-based passive immune globulin active against the strains of avian influenza present in a particular geographic area and gain time for production of human convalescent plasma and other public health measures. This novel approach might also have utility for other serious respiratory infectious diseases, including non-avian influenza, SARS, hantavirus, respiratory syncytial virus, antibiotic-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae and pneumonia-causing Staphylococcus aureus.