Indonesia to produce A/H1N1 vaccine next year

Indonesia would produce 2 million doses vaccine in November next year to stop further spread of A/H1N1 flu that has killed 10 people in the Southeast Asian country, Health Ministry said in Jakarta Friday.

Director General of Disease Control and Environmental Health of the ministry Tjandra Yoga Aditama said that the vaccine would be produced by the country's drug maker Biofarma.

"The production would start in November next year by Biofarma,"he told Xinhua over phone.

The plan came after the United Nations recently asked Biofarma to produce the vaccine amid the concern that the world production would not be sufficient to meet the world's needs of 5 billion doses.

Indonesian Health Minister Endang Rahayu Setyaningsih has said that the country would produce over 2 million doses A/H1N1 flu vaccine.

The director said it was not certain yet whether the vaccines would be used for domestic demand only or to be partly donated to poor countries.

With the world capacity to produce 3 billion doses of the vaccine, the WHO has said that it will not be enough to protect all 6.8 billion people around the globe. It said that Asia will also not have enough vaccines.

The A/H1N1 so far has killed more than 3,900 people out of more than 300,000 infected people across the globe, according to the data of the WHO.

Source: Xinhua