Pandemic Flu Vaccine Remains Long Way Off: Swiss Experts
Posted on: Wednesday, 8 March 2006, 09:01 CST
Pandemic flu vaccine remains long way off: Swiss experts
GENEVA, March 7 (Xinhua) -- 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.
Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS
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