H1N1: the price of the vaccine dose vary from 2.5 to 20 dollars

GENEVA - the price of one dose of vaccine against H1N1 influenza can range from $2.5 to $20 depending on the wealth of the recipient country, according to an official of the World Health Organization (WHO).

•     "Countries with high incomes could pay between $ 10 and $ 20 per dose, middle-income countries would pay about half that price, and poor countries still half," said Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, specialist of vaccines in the organization.
  
      "These figures are not refined, an order of magnitude," she said in an interview published Wednesday in the WHO Bulletin.
  
      "We agree that the first doses of vaccine will be available to governments for use in September," she said.
  
      "The coverage (vaccination of the population) will not be complete, not only in the developing countries," warned Dr Kieny.
  
      "But we should not be obsessed by vaccines," she said, because "there are other measures, such as compliance with a precautionary distance between people, closing schools, avoiding large gatherings of population, antibiotics and personal hygiene.
  
      "It's not like the rabies which is 100% fatal: we are talking about a disease that most people recover from very well," argues the WHO expert.
  
      "We will try to help countries to access as possible to the vaccine, at least to preserve the functioning of health systems (for priority vaccination of health personnel), but there is simply not enough vaccine to vaccinate every member of the population of every country in the world, "she said.
  
      Dr Kieny hoped that "even if the virus mutates the vaccine" will provide sufficient protection. "But if the virus changes too, we need new vaccines," she acknowledged.
  
      The countries of the Northern Hemisphere prepare for winter, enabling a new offensive of the virus H1N1, which has now supplanted that of seasonal influenza and caused at least 2185 deaths worldwide.
  
      
  Ennaharonline/ M. O.