Vaccine makers, health officials to meet at WHO summit in Geneva

There could be no vaccine available when the next pandemic starts, an official says.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- With increasing signs that bird flu is becoming established in Asia and a shortage of flu vaccine in America, health officials from several nations and more than a dozen vaccine companies plan to meet this month for an unprecedented summit to tackle the issue.
Sixteen vaccine companies and health officials from the United States and other large countries already have agreed to attend the summit in Geneva, Switzerland, on Nov. 11, said Klaus Stohr, influenza chief of the United Nations' health agency, the World Health Organization.
Scientists fear that if the bird flu virus mutates enough to mix with the human influenza virus it could easily pass between humans and trigger a global pandemic.
"We believe that we are closer to the next pandemic than we ever were," Stohr said Sunday in an interview before a speech at an American Society for Microbiology meeting in Washington, D.C.
Stohr said several European countries had been invited to the meeting, but he declined to name them. Vaccine makers in Russia and Japan were also invited.
Unprepared for pandemic
The world's total capacity for flu vaccine now is only 300 million doses, and it would take at least six months to develop a new vaccine to fight a pandemic. The WHO wants to get "all issues on the table," monetary and scientific, that prevent getting more vaccine more quickly, he said.
"If we continue as we are now, there will be no vaccine available, let alone antivirals, when the next pandemic starts," Stohr said. "We have a window of opportunity now to prepare ourselves."
Flu kills about 36,000 people in the United States and a million worldwide each year by conservative estimates, Stohr said. But tens of millions die in a pandemic, which occurs every 20 to 30 years, when a flu strain changes so dramatically that people have little immunity from previous flu bouts.
There were three pandemics in the 20th century; all spread worldwide within a year of being detected.
The worst was the Spanish flu in 1918-19, when as many as 50 million people worldwide were thought to have died, nearly half of them young, healthy adults. More than 500,000 died in the United States.
The 1957-58 Asian flu caused about 70,000 deaths in the United States, followed by the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu, which caused about 34,000 U.S. deaths.
U.S. shortage
The current vaccine shortage in the United States, caused by loss of one of the country's two major flu shot suppliers, reveals how vulnerable the world is and serves as a "dress rehearsal" for the kind of rationing and emergency measures that would be needed in a pandemic, said Dr. Wendy Keitel of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
"The ability to respond with the production of billions of doses of vaccine is quite limited," Keitel said. "We need to think through these problems now. Ninety percent of vaccines are produced in 10 countries that have 10 percent of the world's population."