Pandemic flu vaccine remains long way off
8/3/2006 13:36
Efforts to develop bird flu vaccines are being stepped up in western
countries, but these are unlikely to be effective against a human pandemic, some
Swiss experts said on Tuesday.
If the virus were to spread to humans, a new
vaccine would need to be developed - a process that could take as long as six
months, said Sara Kach, an expert from Interpharma, the Swiss pharmaceutical
industry association.
Kach's view was echoed by Swiss Public Health Office
spokesman Jean-Louis Zurcher, who admitted that "if the H5N1 virus mutates and
becomes a human virus, we'll have to find another vaccine."
Kach said the
only option in the meantime would be the anti- viral drugs, namely Tamiflu from
Switzerland's Roche company and Relenza from Britain's GlaxoSmithKline.
"We
really do not know how the virus will mutate, but in Asia there have been cases
where Tamiflu has been effective and we hope this will be the case - but no one
can give a 100 percent guarantee," Kach was quoted as saying by Swiss Radio
International (SRI).
In the meantime, Zurcher confirmed to SRI that
Switzerland had ordered 100,000 doses of pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccine from France's
Sanofi Pasteur, and they would be delivered by the end of the
year.
Preliminary results of clinical trials have shown that the H5N1 vaccine
is quite effective.
But the consensus among experts is that if the virus were
to mutate so it could jump from human to human, the only vaccine that would help
is a newly developed pandemic vaccine.
Currently nine H5N1 cases of bird flu
have been confirmed in Switzerland, including one from Geneva and eight from the
Lake Constance area in the north of the country.
So far only wild birds have
been infected in the country, no domestic fowl have tested positive for the
disease.
Xinhua news
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