AFP/Washington
Mothers with young children and pregnant women are being turned away from swine flu vaccination clinics in the US, 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 US 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 brisk of dying from H1N1 influenza and should be first in line for inoculation.
But after rolling out the vaccine early 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 emphasising 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 half a mile long before the place was even open. There were many, many hundreds of people and more were arriving by the second,” Salzberg said. |
