This year's flu vaccine shortage story is emblematic of the disaster that our health care system has become. Big Pharma would rather make their own patented drugs than vaccines that save lives because patent monopolies make for outrageous profits. Public health imperatives are not not well served by the current market system, and we are unprepared for a potential nightmare scenario that some fear we could face this as soon as this winter.
Yearly death tolls from human flu are about 30,000, or ten times 9/11. This could become an even more dire issue, as the A (H5N1) strain of bird flu, which kills about 75% of those infected, has recently been transmitted from person to person in Thailand. This is the development scientists were dreading, as the virus had previously only been transmissible from bird to human. If the virus mutates or picks up genes from a human flu virus in a person simultaneously infected with both, it has the potential to become the sort of virus that killed about 50 million people in the 1918 global pandemic. That virus was also a bird flu.
A lack of human flu vaccine in Asia due to insufficient production and contracts providing wealthy countries with vaccine first has jeopardized us all. More cases of simultaneous human flu and bird flu in Asia gives more opportunities for creation of more virulent strains capable of rapid and easy human-to-human transmission. Air travel makes this a particularly dangerous global problem.
Many scientists have been distressed by the lack of attention this topic has received. Human flu vaccines take about 8 months to make in eggs, but bird flu virus kills the chick embryos used to grow it. Cell culture reverse engineering, which also takes months, is needed to create the bird flu vaccine, and this process is patented by a US corporation, Medimmune, and the plasmids used are also patented in the U.S. This complicates and delays commercial production of a flu vaccine. During a world pandemic is not a good time to deal with these issues. We must get out in front of this.
WHO has provided the seed strain for the creation of H5N1 bird flu vaccine, made available since April, and NIH is funding vaccine trials in the US, but only 2 (Aventis and Chiron) of about a dozen vaccine manufacturers worldwide have made any strides in production; it remains to be seen if Chiron's recent troubles will worsen the situation. Only tiny amounts of vaccine have thus far been produced. Current global facilities could create about 300 million doses; 2.5-3 billion doses would be needed if a pandemic were to break out. Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to create massive amounts of a vaccine that may or may not be needed.
This subject needs close scrutiny. We need immediate action to give further incentives or apply pressure to pharmaceutical companies to create these vaccines, or we need government-owned labs to do it if private companies don't. It takes too long to make vaccines to rely on market forces which will inevitably respond too late. We need to be ready for a potential public health disaster. This could kill as many people as a world war.
Resources:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0930-16.htm
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=6387601§ion=news
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1096925361687_35?hub=Health
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3703230.stm
http://www.iht.com/articles/543283.html