The federal government is pleased with tests on a new vaccine to protect people from the bird flu. They have decided to go ahead with mass production of the vaccine and hope it can be available as soon as the middle of September.
Before the tests, the government had ordered 2 million vaccines from a French drug maker, Sanofi-Pasteur, but that number is expected to increase dramatically.
The initial tests were conducted on 450 healthy people. The first 115 responses gave volunteers enough of an immune response to protect them from the deadly avian flu. Additional tests on people over the age of 65 are slated to begin next, followed by tests on children. The tests on older Americans will take 4-6 months and will begin in September. Tests on children will begin immediately thereafter.
'We're now, given these results, going to move ahead with ordering from the company additional doses,' Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told the Associated Press.
'I can't tell you exactly how many; that's going to depend on the production capability, but certainly it will be significantly more than the 2 million doses,' Fauci added.
The U.S. government is hoping that the vaccine can avert a pandemic. Officials at the World Health Organization have warned that if the bird flu mutates and can be transmitted directly between humans, a worldwide pandemic can result that could kill as many as 50 million people worldwide.
The last flu pandemic that killed that many people was the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918-1921 that killed more than 30 million in the aftermath of World War I.
