Health Highlights: Aug. 18, 2009
Aug. 19 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:
U.S. Officials Seek Ways To Boost Swine Flu Vaccine Shipments
U.S. health officials are trying to find factories that can help speed up efforts to get swine flu vaccine into syringes in order to lessen an expected shortfall of available shots in October.
The Department of Health and Human Services had long said it would have 120 million swine flu doses ready by Oct. 15, but announced Monday that it expects to have just 45 million doses by that date.
"We're trying to bring on more manufacturing" to deal with a packaging step that's created a bottleneck, Dr. Robin Robinson, the HHS official in charge of vaccine procurement, told the Associated Press. "Hopefully, there are ways to bring that number up."
After Oct. 15, about 20 million more doses of swine flu vaccine should be shipped every week, Robinson said. If that happens, there would be 85 million doses ready by the end of October and the entire order of 195 million by December.
Despite the shortfall, there will still be enough to vaccinate people in priority groups such as public health workers, pregnant women, and children under 4 years old, officials said.
"Our priority groups for vaccination have not changed," U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Hall told ABC News. "We still have enough vaccine to cover the priority groups identified."
The news that there will be far fewer than expected swine flu vaccine doses available in October "makes us all a little bit nervous," said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
"We won't have as much vaccine to start a vaccine program, and we're worried that we will have people sick that could have been prevented and people in the hospital that could have been prevented," he said Tuesday on Good Morning America.
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