white house puts rush on bird flu vaccine***

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http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7000433687

White House Puts Rush on Bird Flu Vaccine
October 8, 2005 12:00 p.m. EST


Douglas Maher - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The White House pushes the "hurry up" button on what is becoming an alarming situation in the nation's capitol.

The Bush Administration presses domestic vaccine manufacturers to increase the nation's ability to fend off an avian influenza pandemic, a vaccine to prevent humans from being infected with a strain of bird flu now circulating in Asia.

According to the Boston Globe, drug maker Sanofi Pasteur Inc., the American subsidiary of a French drug maker, Sanofi-Aventis, has been producing bird flu vaccine at its plant in Pennsylvania since early September through a $100 million contract with the federal government along with GlaxoSmithKline which has been refining the vaccine in Germany.

''In the next few months, we aim to start this. We need approval from regulatory authorities," Dr. Bruce Innis, Glaxo's vice president of clinical research for virus vaccines, says of the early-stage human clinical trials. ''We're anxious to get into a posture of readiness as soon as possible. On the other hand, we don't want to place anyone at risk. So you have to find the right balance."

President Bush announces in a worst-case scenario, more than 1.9 million people in the United States would die and 8.5 million would be hospitalized, costing the U.S. over $450 billion in health care costs.

The country of Norway has been building a stockpile of anti-virals and working on a number of vaccines as the recent reconstruction of the flu virus that killed 30-to-50 million in 1918, showed it was a bird flu that spread easily from person to person. The bird flu currently coursing through poultry flocks in Asia has a higher mortality rate than the 1918 flu strain.

Critics say China and Vietnam are injecting adamintine and relenza into their chickens to keep them alive.