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Mass vaccination against swine flu may begin in Australia within a month, health officials said, heralding one of the world’s biggest public health exercises.
Two million doses from Melbourne-based CSL Ltd. will be ready by the end of this month, enabling the program to commence once interim data from human trials have been assessed in early September, Australia’s Health Minister Nicola Roxon said today.
- Australia has ordered 21 million doses of swine flu vaccine, one for each person, with mass vaccinations to start nationally within weeks, the government said on Thursday.
“It’s absolutely the right thing to do, no question,” Lorena Brown, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Melbourne, said in a telephone interview. “We don’t have any preexisting immunity, with the exception of the elderly who might have a bit, so the vaccine will hopefully halt the spread.”
NORTHERN hemisphere countries have so far ordered more than one billion doses of H1N1 flu vaccine, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday, sparking warnings over shortages.Some countries - notably Greece, The Netherlands, Canada and Israel - have ordered enough double doses to inoculate their entire populations.
Others, such as Germany, the United States, Britain and France, have put in orders that would cover between 30 and 78 per cent of people.
Pandemic vaccine orders put in by northern hemisphere countries stand at over one billion,' WHO spokesman Melinda Henry told AFP.
In July, the WHO said that the 25 drug companies which had announced their intention to manufacture vaccines could crank out up to 94 million doses per week starting in mid-October.
The global health body revised these numbers sharply downward when the top half-dozen vaccine makers - accounting for 85 per cent of global production - reported that the swine flu strains with which they were working did not reproduce as quickly as expected.
'The current vaccine strain would only yield 25 to 50 per cent' of the original estimate, as low as 23 million doses per week, said Ms Henry.
Clinical tests have not yet confirmed whether new strains under development will produce higher yields, and initial results for at least one, reviewed by WHO on Tuesday, are not encouraging.----
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