PRESIDENT Barack Obama's decision last week to label swine flu a national emergency will likely increase demand for a vaccine that is already in short supply. Yet by the time large amounts of vaccine arrive, it may be too late to stop most infections.
On 23 October, Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, reported that the US had received 27.4 million doses of vaccine. This is not enough even for the country's 42 million most vulnerable people: pregnant women, people caring for babies, children under 4, front-line healthcare workers and under-18s with medical problems.
By now, the US should have had 120 million doses, according to predictions in July. This estimate was cut to 45 million when it emerged in August that the vaccine virus was growing at half the usual rate. Now even some of those doses have not arrived. Several companies are now using a faster-growing strain to make vaccine, but supplies won't arrive for weeks.
A calculation by Shelly Towers and Zhilan Feng at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, shows that this will be too late to stop the majority of infections. Their model indicates that with no vaccination, around 25 per cent of people in the US stand to get sick during the current wave, with infections peaking around now. If vaccination was proceeding according to the CDC's latest forecast, just 6 per cent of these infections would be prevented - because vaccination would come too late to protect many people. In fact, vaccine deliveries have been at the low end of the CDC forecast.
With no vaccination, 25 per cent of people in the US stand to get sick during the current wave
Vaccination is far from pointless, however. At least 2000 lives still stand to be saved, Towers estimates, and people who get the shot now will have at least partial immunity should H1N1 mutate and cause a pandemic wave next spring, she says.
Read more: Swine flu: Eight myths that could endanger your life
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Have your say
Whats Happening In The Uk?
Thu Oct 29 13:15:36 GMT 2009 by Graham
http://www.theaxion.com
All very well telling us what is happening (or not) in the US but what is happening with vaccine deliveries and the second wave in the UK?
Are we in a similar position and if so why hasnt the government declared a national emergency?
It seems too that many offered the vaccine wont take it because of many of the myths mentioned here in NS in another article on the website so that means that even fewer will get the vaccine and as such it will not prevent infections spreading and subsequent deaths will be higher.
The models that included wide use of the vaccine were used to plan resources for the health care systems like the NHS, if the models are now wrong because the vaccine will be ineffective then the NHS may collapse under the strain of the second wave.
Perhaps NS could get comment from UK government swine flu/NHS policy makers?
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