WHO says health workers priority for H1N1 vaccine

Healthcare workers should get priority access to H1N1 flu vaccinations to ensure health systems keep functioning as the swine flu pandemic spreads around the globe, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on today, according to an article by Laura MacInnis and Ben Hirschler of www.reuters.com.



Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research, said the agency\'s experts had concluded every country in the world would need access to vaccines, which drug companies are now racing to produce.



Disappointingly, Kieny said, yields from growing the new virus in chicken eggs, the mainstay of flu vaccine production had so far been \"poor,\" at only 25 to 50 per cent of that achieved with normal seasonal flu strains.



\"The (WHO group of experts) recommended first that healthcare workers should be immunised in all countries in order to retain a functional health system as the virus evolves,\" she told reporters in a conference call.



\"In terms of the other groups it depends on the strategy a country wants to follow.\"



The WHO has previously estimated that the world could have as many as 4.9 billion doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine ready for the next flu season but this assumes people only need one shot and production yields are similar to seasonal vaccine.