Army to build a new factory to manufacture H1N1 vaccine.

CAIRO: The Egyptian Armed Forces will build a new factory to manufacture the H1N1 vaccine in Sixth of October City, Mohamed Rabie, president of the Egyptian Holding Company for Biological Products and Vaccines (VASCERA), announced on TV Wednesday.

Rabie said the construction of the factory, on a 2,250-meter-square land, will not take a lot of time and work will be done "very soon."

However, Rabie explained that the start of construction is pending the Ministry of Health's approval of the vaccine's chemical formula.

Mohamed Ahmed, professor at the National Council for Research, told the official Middle East News Agency on Wednesday that the new H1N1 vaccine can be ready in six months. If the virus mutates, he added, an additional two weeks would be required to change the formula.Aa

Ahmed added that that National Council for Research has all the needed technology to produce the vaccine.

Rabie's announcement follows many calls from parliament members and medical experts asking the government to produce the H1N1 vaccine locally. Production costs are lower than what it would cost to import the vaccine, according to Hamdallah Zedan, an official in the Egyptian Organization for Biological Products and Vaccines.

Minister of Health Hatem El-Gabaly said earlier that the ministry will not rush "into purchasing huge amounts of the H1N1 vaccine until the situation calls for it."

The Ministry of Health had only booked 5 million doses of the new vaccine; each patient is required to take two doses to be immunized from the virus, while the Egyptian population is estimated to be around 80 million.

In a recent press conference, El-Gabaly said it is not "reasonable to make the government pay millions of dollars in a disease that is not severe and can be treated with regular aspirin and a few days of rest."

About 80,000 doses of the 5 million doses that Egypt has booked will be available in the country in October and to be sold at LE 35 each, which is the average price of vaccines. The regular flu vaccine in Egypt is sold with LE 30.

Rabie noted that Egypt does not have a local factory to make regular flu vaccine.

According to Rabie, the government had paid a lot of money to import vaccine for the regular flu, but most of it remained unused and eventually expired. This is why, he added, the government wasn't able to finance a factory for the local production of the vaccine.

However VACSERA sees that the situation differed with the new types of flu.

"The situation is now different with the bird flu and the swine flu, especially that health authorities have announced that bird flu has become more aggressive and that swine flu could change and become more severe. So no one can predict how it will develop and what the situation will be in the coming years," Zedan said in a previous press statement.

Daily NewsEgypt 2009

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