Doctors and nurses should be the first in line to receive a new vaccine against swine-flu influenza, but difficulties in growing the virus indicate that the first fully licensed vaccine might not be available until the end of the year, a World Health Organization spokeswoman said Monday.
The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts, the WHO’s highest-level advisory group, met last week and concluded that health care workers should be immunized first “to maintain a functional health system as the pandemic evolves,” Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO’s Initiative for Vaccine Research, said in a news conference from Geneva. “They put themselves at risk and need to remain in good health to care for pandemic influenza patients.”
Kieny noted that “people will also continue to be ill with other diseases which need to be taken care of by health care professionals.”
After that, it will be up to individual countries to decide their own priorities for vaccination, the group said, but those that should be considered include children, pregnant women, the obese and those with chronic health conditions, including respiratory diseases and asthma.
“If the first objective is to stop transmission as much as possible,” the primary target should be children, “who are an amplifier of infection because they meet in groups,” Kieny said. If the primary objective is to reduce morbidity and mortality, then the latter groups should be first in line because they are the most likely to suffer serious illness requiring hospitalization.
The importance of vaccinating health care workers was demonstrated in June, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that at least 81 health workers had confirmed cases of the pandemic A(H1N1) 09 influenza virus. And British authorities reported Monday that Dr. Michael Day died Saturday from complications of the flu, becoming the first known physician to die in the pandemic.
When the vaccine will become available is not clear. Some doses have been made, “but they are by no means ready to be licensed yet,” Kieny said. They will require considerable testing to determine dosage and to look at safety, and clinical trials are not expected to begin until September and October.
As of last week, the WHO had reported nearly 95,000 confirmed cases of swine flu and 429 deaths.
