Hong Kong orders three million swine flu shots
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Hong Kong has ordered three million doses of swine flu vaccine -- enough for nearly half the city's population -- as it braces for more outbreaks of the virus this winter, officials said.
The health department ordered the vaccine from French drug maker Sanofi Pasteur with the first half a million doses scheduled to arrive by December. The remaining 2.5 million doses will arrive in January, the department said.
A free vaccination program next month will be offered to about two million people in high-risk groups, including healthcare workers, pregnant women, the elderly and children under six, the department said.
The program is voluntary, it added.
People in lower-risk groups can get the vaccine for a fee which has not yet been determined, a health department spokeswoman told AFP.
"More outbreaks are expected during flu season in early next year," the health department said in a statement.
Thirty-nine people have died of swine flu in Hong Kong with about 32,000 people infected, officials said.
The illness has killed more than 5,700 people worldwide since it was first uncovered in April, the World Health Organization has said.
Hong Kong is very nervous about infectious diseases following the outbreak of the SARS virus in 2003, which killed 300 people here and a further 500 around the world.
pb/elw
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Comments
There will never be enough vaccine unless we wait at least 12 months after a vaccine has been created. The reason, there is not the manufacturing capacity to produce it quicker in the world-at-large and the distribution logistics make this a very slow process. Overall the drugs strategy, if ever the real killer virus emerges as in 1918, will be of no real use whatsoever to the vast majority of people as it will arrive too late. The Spanish flu which killed between 20 million and 100 million (equivalent today to between 68 million and 340 million people dying taking in people numbers now and then, but where the death rate could most probably be far greater and nearer 1 billion deaths due to far more rapid transit than in 1918) did its worst in the first six-months of its outbreak (and here remember that it takes 6-months to create a vaccine). Therefore time is just against the whole drugs strategy and governments as usual are deceiving us. It is common sense really unfortunately for all of us except the chosen few – Wall Street bankers et al.
The only solution that will stop this dreaded killer, which is only a matter of time before it emerges, is to address the problem at source and never let it happen in the first place –
http://avian-influenza.cirad.fr/con
If humankind ignores its only 100% safeguard to avert catastrophic death rates, we will only have ourselves to blame. The irony of it all is that even the bankers and politicians will not survive and where they presently think that they will.