Washington: Mothers with young children and pregnant women are being turned away from swine flu vaccination clinics in the United States, some in tears, many utterly frustrated by the shortage of vaccine.
But it could have been much worse. The new strain of H1N1 flu could have been much more virulent, and it could even have been bird flu, which, because of the way the United States produces flu vaccine, could wreak havoc.
Months back, when a swine flu vaccine was still just a glimmer in scientists’ eyes, US health officials were driving home the message that children, and especially those with underlying health conditions like asthma and pregnant women were at great risk of dying from H1N1 influenza and should be first in line for innoculation.
But after rolling out the vaccine last month, the authorities ran into a problem: There wasn’t enough to go around. “The National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done a very good job of emphasizing the importance of getting vaccinated. But then there’s no vaccine,” said Steven Salzberg, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland.
Salzberg’s wife and younger daughters were among thousands who queued last week in Rockville, a suburb of Washington, for swine flu vaccinations. “They left when they saw the line was about 1km long before the place was even open. There were many, many hundreds arriving by the second,” Salzberg said.
Last week, as child deaths spiked well above the annual toll for kids from seasonal flu, vaccination clinics in the county that includes Rockville were abruptly cancelled. The county’s supply of vaccine had run dry. So what if this had been the next “big one”, a flu on the scale of the pandemic that killed tens of millions around the globe in 1918? After all, the strain of flu that caused the 1918 pandemic was also H1N1, the grandfather of today’s swine flu pandemic.
“If we had a really virulent highly infectious influenza strain today, it could easily be as bad as 1918,” said Salzberg. But David Beshai, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said progress in health care and nutrition mean “a replica of 1918 is not in the cards.
“When you really need vaccine quickly, we just can’t do it, and this has now been demonstrated,” Salzberg said. He said changing the way the United States makes flu vaccine was too costly for companies to put in place and would have to come from the highest political levels.
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