in this symposium have shown that sensitivity of the FRT/PCR approach for avian influenza viruses could be improved, but specificity is very good and costs promise to be cheaper than the immunologically based detection kits. More research is certainly needed to provide prepackaged reagents that could be used by early responders to detect influenza viruses in the environment. However, given the commercial success of this technology, which was used quite extensively during the anthrax attack in the fall of 2001, it is definitely worth pursuing avian influenza specific primer and probe development and validation of assays in real-world settings, such as those described in this symposium.

Jeroen K. Medema,^4,5 York F. Zoellnerb,⁶ James Ryan,⁷ Abraham M. Palachea⁸

Reprinted with permission from Elsevier. Published in Virus Research, Medema et al., 2004. Copyright 2004, Elsevier.

Influenza pandemic planning is a complex, multifactorial process, which involves public health authorities, regulatory authorities, academia and industry. It is further complicated by the unpredictability of the time of emergence and severity of the next pandemic and the effectiveness of influenza epidemic interventions. The complexity and uncertainties surrounding pandemic preparedness have so far kept the various stakeholders from joining forces and tackling the problem from its roots. We developed a mathematical model, which shows the tangible consequences of conceptual