December 15, 2005

 

Indonesia to develop bird flu vaccine for humans
 

 

Indonesia's health minister Siti Fadilah Supari said the government planned to locally produce a bird flu vaccine for humans, which would likely become available in December 2006, without elaborating.

 

The government's plans for local production of a H5N1 vaccine for humans reflects heightening official concern about the rising human death toll from the country's ongoing H5N1 epidemic in poultry.

 

Indonesia has recorded a total of nine human fatalities out of 14 confirmed cases of the illness since July.

 

No vaccine currently exists that would prevent humans from catching bird flu. Instead governments worldwide are deploying normal influenza vaccines, in a bid to prevent a seasonal flu from combining with H5N1 and mutating into a much deadlier virus that could easily pass between humans.

 

International health experts said it would take months to develop a vaccine if or when a potentially deadly mutant H5N1 strain emerges.

 

Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced last month that Baxter would work with Indonesian vaccine producer Bio Farma to produce a H5N1 vaccine for humans.

 

Supari said that the government has chosen Bio Farma to help produce the vaccine because the firm is a World Health Organization-approved vaccines supplier.

 

The WHO re-certified Bio Farma as a vaccine supplier in September after the firm lost that approval in February for failure to fulfill unspecified administrative procedures.

 

Bio Farma's role in a potential Baxter vaccine partnership would be as a "downstream producer" of a formula developed and shipped from Baxter in the US, Bio Farma's President Marzuki Abdullah said.

 

"It's much faster with a downstream process because we don't have time and it takes too long to start (vaccine development and production) from scratch," Marzuki said, without elaborating.