Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Good News on Pandemic Flu Vaccine?

Massive investments in vaccine manufacturing capacity and innovative vaccine technologies have paid off, says the WHO. Now the world's capacity to manufacture vaccine in the event of a pandemic is far greater than predicted last year.

"Last spring, the World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine manufacturers said that about 100 million courses of pandemic influenza vaccine based on the H5N1 avian influenza strain could be produced immediately with standard technology. Experts now anticipate that global production capacity will rise to 4.5 billion pandemic immunization courses per year in 2010."

Even with this heartening advance, this is still 2 billion courses short of what would be needed in the first 6 months for the world.

From WHO: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2007/pr60/en/index.html

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