Experts at WHO Announce Ability to Produce More Bird Flu Vaccine

The World Health Organization has said recent advantages in science, coupled with the ability to increase the manufacturing capacity of drug companies made it possible to increase production levels of bird flu vaccines in future.

This was what experts concluded in a meeting of an advisory group of the WHO. The group was meeting to discuss production of a pandemic influenza vaccine. The experts warned they had been unable to develop a vaccine that was completely effective in controlling the bird flu virus.

According to the experts, work on such a virus was still at a developmental stage and it could be a while before they were able to develop one. According to a statement released by the WHO in 2006, drug companies manufacturing vaccines had said taking the current H5N1 avian influenza as the basis they could produce about 100 million different courses of pandemic influenza vaccine.

During the course of the current meeting, the experts were able to revise that number to 4.5 billion courses of pandemic vaccines by the year 2010. That is a definite improvement over last year’s figures. Marie-Paule Kieny, director of WHO’s Initiative for Vaccine Research, said this progress was significant.

Kieny said while this was significant improvement over the figures stated last year, it was still not enough. She said the objective of the WHO as well as officials of the public health domain was to ensure the immunization of every person on this planet, which meant the ability to develop 6.7 billion such strains, one for each individual.

Kieny also said this had to be done within a maximum time frame of six months because a pandemic, when it struck, came in waves and not as isolated incidents. She said the way to achieve this was for drug manufacturers to develop the ability to develop strains in six-month cycles. That way those who could not be immunized in the first wave of a pandemic could be immunized in the next one.

For this to actually happen, pharmaceutical companies would need to be able to deliver one billion strains of pandemic vaccines annually, Kieny said. That was the only way they would arrive at the magic initial number of 4.5 billion strains of vaccines.

Kieny said the composition of the bird flu vaccine was not as complex as that of the general flu vaccine available now, and that companies could stop producing the general flu vaccine and concentrate instead on the bird flu vaccine when a pandemic struck.

Currently the process of developing an effective vaccine against the bird flu pandemic is in the human testing stage. Scientists in the United States as well as Europe are testing a vaccine that would provide protection against the H5N1 strain of bird flu, a potentially lethal flu.

Some of the subjects on whom the scientists tested the vaccine developed antibodies to the bird flu strain on inoculation. However, there is still a long way ahead, as there are numerous scenarios scientists would have to consider. One such was mutation; if the flu strain mutated, the vaccine would have no effect, and would require further polishing.

So far, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has claimed over 200 human lives, besides the lives of hundreds of millions of birds. The biggest fear of scientists is that the virus could possibly mutate into something that allows it to be transmitted among humans as well, and not just birds. If that were to happen, it could end up claiming millions of human lives.