The holding company for biological products and vaccines “Vacsera” based in Egypt begin to construct a new factory for seasonal flu vaccine manufacturing. The new factory will be constructed at the industrial zone in 6 October government, and it will be ready to produce its first batch of seasonal flu vaccine by 2011.
“We took this step as our national demands for the seasonal flu vaccine raised from 500.000 units the past several years to 2 million units this year, and there are shortage in the world stock for the vaccine, so we see it is essential for us to manufacture our needs from it instead of waiting the large companies in Europe to supply it,” said Dr. Azza sadek the media representative and public relationship director at Vacsera
Sadek also pointed that they won’t only produce their nation demands from the vaccine but also they may be able to export it to African and middle eastern countries as well.
The new factory will be used also to produce vaccines against the H1N1 virus, that is what DR. Hatem El-Gabali the health minister of Egypt announced, "We have a plan to produce the first batch (of Egypt's H1N1 flu vaccine) by April 2011," Gabali said to Reuters.
Sadek assured that the new factory is made mainly to produce the seasonal flu vaccine.”But by 2011 if there are any need to manufacture H1N1 vaccine, we will do it for sure.” Add Sadek.
Dr. Mostafa Orkhan the Ex-director of the World Health Organization's (WHO) National Influenza Center for Egypt Condemned the fact of building a factory especially for manufacturing H1N1 vaccine,” After 2 years from now we’ll have two scenarios, the first there is no virus named H1N1 at all, and the second that we will have different strain from the virus, so we cannot work from now to produce such a vaccine,” said Orkhan. “We begin to produce the seasonal flu vaccine in March to be ready by the end of August” Orkhan commented on the minister’s announcements.
It’s worth mentioning that many developing countries moving towards manufacturing its own flu vaccines, such as India, Indonesia, China and South Africa fearing of world stock shortage of the vaccine that may put there nations in danger.
