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Health and medicine

Bush pushes for ample bird flu vaccine

WASHINGTON - President Bush summoned vaccine manufacturers to a White House meeting today, hoping to boost the rickety industry amid increasing fears of a worldwide outbreak of bird flu.

This month, vaccinemaker Sanofi-Pasteur begins the first mass production of a new vaccine against bird flu, producing $100-million worth of inoculations for a government stockpile.

But it would take months to create a new vaccine from scratch if a different strain of bird flu than today's, known as H5N1, emerges. Even if the vaccine works, Sanofi is producing enough to protect anywhere from 2-million to 20-million people - depending on how much must be put into each dose - and it's not clear when or where similar large stockpiles could be made.

Bush called together major vaccine companies "to press ahead to expand our manufacturing capacity for a vaccine to address this risk," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday.

Later this month, the Bush administration will issue updated plans to deal with a pandemic, and a key part will be "how to revitalize that industry in a way to have the capacity not just that it meets H5N1 but any potential pandemic virus," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said.

Scientists have been warning for two years that bird flu in Southeast Asia is growing more ominous and the nation must prepare.

Influenza pandemics erupt every few decades when the virus mutates into a new strain. The last pandemic was in 1968.

Even the ordinary flu kills 36,000 Americans every year. The bird flu so far has killed only about 60 people, mostly poultry workers, even as it has killed or led to the slaughter of millions of birds. But if it changes so it can spread easily from person to person, it would be catastrophic because people have no natural immunity to it.

GERMANY: The Friedrich Loeffler Institute has been developing a bird flu vaccine for the wild birds that carry the virus. They hope to administer it by aerosol or through drinking water, with the goal of knocking out the virus before it reaches people. Dr. Martin Beer, the head of virus diagnostics at the institute, said the vaccine was succeeding in tests so far, but full approval is years away.

HUNGARY: The nation's health minister and two senior aides were test subjects for a new bird flu vaccine last month. Results aren't yet known.

NETHERLANDS: Poultry farmers were allowed to let domestic birds outside beginning on July 29 after a monthlong indoor quarantine - but only if the chickens, turkeys and ducks were released into fenced areas with roofs. Health officials want to protect them from the virus, which can be spread through the feces of infected wild birds.

FRANCE: The nation is stockpiling 200-million protective face masks and is planning to have 14-million doses of an antiflu drug available by 2006.

EUROPEAN UNION: The organization in February banned poultry, poultry meat and other live birds from much of Asia. It added Russia to the list in August.

INDONESIA: The nation, where four people have caught bird flu and three have died, is taking little action. It resists killing large numbers of chickens to stamp out the disease and has yet to pay farmers for the small number of foul culled earlier this year. Indonesian health officials say other fatal or crippling diseases present more immediate threats to the nation than bird flu.

Information from Knight Ridder Newspapers was used in this report.

[Last modified October 7, 2005, 01:51:07]