dr. inglesby mentioned in his testimony. kill the chickens that have h5n1 and make sure we get rid of the reservoir, that's difficult to do because you have countries not interested for economic and other reasons. the other thing is to have available countermeasures that actually work and work really very well. and the idea of getting a universal influenza vaccine is not only going to be very important for seasonal influenza, so we don't have to keep chasing each year and getting the right combination and matching it with what is circulating out there, but also, it is a major, major countermeasure against the emergence of a pandemic, so we are putting a considerable amount of effort and we've had some encouraging scientific advances over the past year and a half to two years on understanding much better the type of immune response that you need to induce in an individual to cover virtually all strains. we're not there yet, but this is something we see as the light at the end of the tunnel. it's risky to predict when you have

dr. inglesby. the short-term benefit of research, we wouldn't do a lot of research at the nih, because you very often have a situation where it is incremental and you build up into something that really becomes important. so although i understand the point is being made, if you look at what immediate benefit of those mutations are going to have right now, sure, you can say that there isn't a lot of surveillance capabilities, or high sequencing, et cetera. but the incremental accumulation of knowledge is one of the fundamental principles that the nah -- the nih research is built upon. i think is a bit of a disagree on the. i don't think you need to have an absolute media benefit to research not to be ultimately important to do and to publish. >> do you want to respond? >> yes. actually i complete agree with wages since i don't think we disagree on the. i agree that fundamental research and understand biological risk is both critical and is a part of the, critical part of the science mission. this is

dr. inglesby highlights the ongoing efforts to develop vaccines focused on h5n1. i wonder whether the findings of these kinds of studies will lead nih and other organizations that fund vaccine research to increase the priority that you're placing on these kinds of research efforts. >> the answer is a resounding, yes. the situation, there are a couple of ways of getting rid of this problem. one of them i think dr. inglesby mentioned in his testimony, certainly in some discussions we've had, just kill the chickens that have h5n1 and make sure that we just get rid of the reservoir. that's very difficult to do because you have countries that are not very interested for economic and other reasons. the other thing is to have available countermeasures that actually work and work really very well. and the idea of getting a universal influenza vaccine is not only going to be very important for seasonal influenza so we don't have to keep chasing each year getting the right combination and matching it with what is circulating, but also it is a major, major countermeasure aga