by Stacy Kess

Created on: November 17, 2009

It's a war, one with everything from high tech weapons to basic battle techniques.

It's the H1N1 flu and the science behind infection control.

"It's keeping infections from spreading from one person to another," said University of Michigan Clinical Associate Professor Sandro Cinti, who works in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Internal Medicine. "And infection control depends entirely on how a bacteria, fungus, organism is transmitted. So there are different procedures for something that is spread through contact, and something that is spread through the air like influenza."

In the battle against H1N1 - or any flu - hand washing has emerged as the basic battle technique alongside the high-tech weapon of the vaccine.

"The best way to prevent spread on a large scale is to vaccinate if you have the vaccine," Cinti said.

Vaccines are nothing new. Physician Edward Jenner conducted an experiment in 1796 in which he inoculated a young boy with cowpox from an infected woman through a small cut on the boys arm. Six weeks later, Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox, but the boy showed immunity.

More than 200 years later, MedImmune, the biologics unit of drug company AstraZeneca, employs advanced technology.

"For the attenuated vaccine, we developed it using the same techniques for our seasonal strain, and that process is called reversed genetics," said Kathleen Coelingh, the senior director of Medical and Scientific Affairs for MedImmune. "It's just a faster and more reliable way."

Coelingh said it's a vast improvement over how vaccines used to be prepared.

"This is our third season of using this new method," she said. "Before we instituted it, we spent several seasons before these three seasons comparing the reverse genetic strains with previous methods."

The process of reverse genetics allows the vaccine makers to use virus materials sent by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create a variety of different "seeds" - in the case of the H1N1 virus, 23 different seeds at MedImmune.

In "Reverse Genetics of Influenza Viruses - Applications in Research and Vaccine Design," from the 2008 publication "Avian Influenza," a team of scientists describe the process of reverse genetics as opposed to the artificial generation of influenza viruses, a method previously used.

Flu viruses, they explain, contain segmented genomes. The vaccine required that all the segments be transferred to the nucleus, where flu replicates. It was also required that

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