According to the state media, China is about to begin mass-production of a new bird flu vaccine for poultry by the end of the month.

Apparently the country’s scientists have been working on the new vaccine for four years and Beijing says it is aiming to inoculate all the country’s estimated 14bn poultry and produce one billion doses of a new bird flu vaccine for animals.

It seems the vaccine will cost a fifth of current treatments, and there are hopes it could also help provide the basis for human protection against the deadly H5N1 strain of flu.

The new vaccine will be used alongside existing vaccines from next year, says China’s chief veterinarian Jia Youling, and he hopes that research and production techniques will provide reference for developing new vaccines for human infections of bird flu.

It seems that the live vaccine, will also be effective against another poultry disease, Newcastle disease.

The vaccine can be delivered orally, nasally or by spraying and will cost far less than existing inactivated vaccine.

Newcastle disease killed almost 57,000 chickens in China in September.

Standard flu shots are inactivated, meaning the virus is killed, but live vaccines contain weakened forms of the live virus.

China is already halfway through the vaccination of its all domestic poultry, as many as 14bn chickens and ducks.

To date there have been 141 confirmed human cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, all of them in Asia, including six in China.

Of 73 known bird flu fatalities in Asia, two have been in China.

In many parts of China, people and birds live in close proximity, and the World Health Organisation says that China needs to change its farming practices.

It has called for greater segregation between humans and poultry, if the spread of the virus is to be stopped.

Scientists fear the strain could mutate from a disease that largely affects birds to one that can pass easily between people, leading to a human pandemic.

According to the state media, intensive poultry vaccination campaigns and enforced quarantine of bird flu outbreak areas have shown results in China’s fight against bird flu.

Only one county out of 31 to have reported the H5N1 strain of bird flu this year still remains under isolation and there have been no new outbreaks reported for about three weeks.

China had also vaccinated more than 5 billion birds since October this year.