"Flu vaccine | Preparing for a pandemic"

The full Economist.com article: (September 22, 2005)

"Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, George Bush announced a new international partnership to address avian and pandemic influenza. World health ministers will meet in Canada next month to discuss how to pool resources, boost surveillance and improve the capacity to contain and respond to an outbreak. The World Health Organisation (WHO) wants more governments to draw up preparedness plans (only 40 have these so far) and agree on how they will co-ordinate their responses..........

"Most of the world's flu vaccine is produced in nine countries: Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States. Europe produces 70% of the vaccines. And Europe's vaccine producers are worried. Without international agreements now, they say there is a high risk of inadequate, inequitable and delayed supplies of vaccines. Among public-health officials and vaccine manufacturers, there is a widespread assumption that, during an outbreak, countries with production facilities would declare a national emergency and limit or ban the export of vaccine to other countries. That might be good for people living in the nine countries on the list, but it would leave the rest of the world without any vaccine at all........

"America's National Institutes of Health has paid Sanofi Pasteur and Chiron, a manufacturer based in Emeryville, California, to make prototype vaccines against H5N1, the strain of bird flu that is currently circulating. Should superflu emerge from this bird flu, the hope is that these vaccines would confer enough resistance against the new strain of superflu to save lives. And having a prototype or a pre-approved vaccine would speed the drug-approval process."