With a likely “explosion” of swine flu in the coming months, a leading WHO official has urged China to distribute vaccines to needy nations to help contain the disease.
“We would greatly welcome an initiative by the Chinese government to support developing and needy countries in a fair distribution of this vaccine,” Shin Young-soo, WHO’s regional director for the Western Pacific, said in a statement received late on Friday.
Shin’s remarks came after Chinese Health Minister Chen Zhu (陳竺) reported on China’s efforts to develop a vaccine for the A(H1N1) virus at a symposium on swine flu in the Asia-Pacific region.
Shin warned the virus was entering an “acceleration period” and predicted more deaths and more cases as the “pandemic will get worse before the situation gets better.”
“Most countries may see a doubling of cases every three to four days for two months until peak transmission is reached,” Shin told the symposium on Friday. “At a certain point, there will seem to be an explosion in case numbers. I believe it is very likely that all countries will see community-level transmission by the end of the year.”
About 1,800 people have died since the A(H1N1) virus was first uncovered in April, according to the latest update from the WHO issued this week. The vast majority of those deaths have been recorded in the Americas.
The WHO said earlier this week that countries in the northern hemisphere alone had ordered more than 1 billion doses of swine flu vaccine, sparking warnings about shortages, given the intense demand and production delays.
A Chinese drug company, Sinovac Biotech, this week announced positive preliminary data from its clinical trials after giving test subjects just one dose of its vaccine.
“We are also very encouraged by preliminary but promising results from the clinical trials of H1N1 vaccine,” Shin said of the Chinese vaccine.
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Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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