Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Monday, October 27, 2008 10:10 am TWN, By Susan Crowley, Special to The China Post

Sponsors
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.

A jab at bird flu prevention

Vaccine research is a risky business with an extremely high failure rate: Even if a company does get access to the virus samples, it is unlikely anything marketable will emerge for ages. For a drug to make it to market, drug approval bodies (such as the FDA in the U.S.) require it to pass through at least four phases of trials. Less than one in a thousand molecules make it past the first, pre-clinical, stage. The chances of a drug making it all the way to approval are less than 0.03%. It therefore costs on average US$1 billion to bring a new vaccine to market, a huge amount for even the biggest company to risk.

Another issue in pandemic control is the need to produce huge quantities of vaccines rapidly. It takes several months to mass-produce seasonal flu vaccines via the traditional, egg-based method. This won’t be quick enough in times of emergency. Therefore, millions need to be spent on researching new, speedier cell-based methods of vaccine production.

If the Indonesian government demands that the private sector hand over too much in the way of intellectual property and technology in return for samples of body fluid in which viruses reside, companies will be deterred from researching an avian flu vaccine. Without a preventative vaccine, the chances increase of a 1918-style pandemic.

Indonesia may have already pushed too far on this: At the World Health Assembly in May, Member States of the World Health Organization rubber-stamped many Indonesian proposals relating to mandatory private-sector technology-transfer in return for virus sharing. These kinds of provisions make it too risky for companies to invest in vaccine research so they render a vaccine less likely: While governments can be good at early stage research, the vast majority of medicines available today were developed by the private sector.

The WHO will discuss this again in Geneva in December. Indonesia’s health minister has already stated that her plan will win global support.

Kartono Mohamad, former head of Indonesia’s doctor’s association has said: “She’s not only gambling with the virus but the safety and security of the Indonesian people as well.”

This gamble could leave, Indonesia and vaccine companies with nothing. The losers will be the ordinary people of the world who will be left defenceless against an avian flu pandemic.

Susan Crowley is a consultant on relations between the private sector and international organizations and has been a guest lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health.

1|2