Hungary says it could make 50 million bird flu vaccine doses
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Hungary could make 50 million doses of vaccine for bird flu, mostly for export, the health authority chief said after he and the health minister became the first participants in the country’s human trials of the vaccine.
“We are not feeling as though our ears were growing and our nails are fine,” Health Minister Jeno Racz joked after he got the jab for the H5N1 strain of the virus on Monday.
Hungary, with a population of 10 million, is the only one of the 10 countries that joined the European Union last year with the capacity to produce the vaccine, health authority chief Laszlo Bujdoso told reporters.
Bird flu has killed 65 people in four Asian countries since late 2003 and has been found in birds in Russia and Europe.
Hungary, along with some other countries, was given samples of the virus from the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop the vaccine. It is being produced by the national epidemiology center and a private company.
The vaccine will now be tested in around 100 volunteers, mostly laboratory and health staff who could come into contact with the virus through their work anyway, and first results will be available in three weeks, Bujdoso said.
Staff at Hungary’s embassy in Indonesia, where bird flu has killed several people, have been advised to take part in the trials, he added.
“If it is the H5N1 (type of the virus) that turns out to be able to spread from human to human, then we could start production immediately,” Bujdoso said.
If a different strain of the virus becomes dangerous for humans, it would take Hungary eight weeks to produce the first 500,000 vaccines after receiving the virus from the WHO, and it could then make another half a million doses per week.
“There is a relatively small chance that bird flu could cause human illness in Hungary,” Bujdoso said. He added that there was no need for preventive immunization of the country’s population at the moment.
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