Geneva, July 13 (DPA) Drug makers should continue to produce seasonal flu vaccines, rather than switching all their resources to swine flu, a World Health Organisation (WHO) official said Monday.
There had been some speculation that pharmaceutical companies might downgrade traditional seasonal flu vaccine production after the new swine flu virus was deemed “unstoppable” last month.

The WHO declared swine flu to be pandemic in June - meaning it had spread globally.

Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO’s director on vaccine research, said there was a real need for vaccines for swine flu.

The H1N1 pandemic “is unstoppable and therefore all countries would need to have access to vaccines”, Keiny told reporters.

She noted that production on a vaccine for pandemic A(H1N1), as the new influenza is technically called, was under way, though testing and subsequent licensing could take until September.

Kieny added that so far yields for the new vaccine were small, though the pharmaceutical companies were looking at methods to increase output.

Vaccine experts have said that once a vaccine was ready, health workers should get priority in receiving the doses, so that medical services would continue to function. While the virus is mostly mild it still leads to illness, similar to seasonal flu.

Governments would have to decide what other groups would receive preferred status, based on their national health plans and given the low yields.

Vulnerable groups, like the elderly, could be targeted by vaccine programmes and children could be deemed a priority group in order to mitigate the spread.

The new virus was disproportionately affected younger adults, the WHO has said, leading some to theorise that older people built up certain resistances during the last flu pandemic, over four decades ago.

Obese people were also now considered to be an at-risk group.

Vaccines for the next round of seasonal flu were said to be 90 percent ready.