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SEOUL: South Korea will build its own factory to
produce human bird flu vaccine, health officials said Thursday as
authorities battle the country’s worst outbreak among poultry.
The factory will produce enough
vaccine to treat 20 million people a year and will be built next
year at Hwasun, 270 kilometers (160 miles) south of Seoul, the
Health ministry said in a report to parliament.
It also promised to secure enough
stocks of the antiviral flu medicine Tamiflu to treat 10 million
people by 2012.
Local pharmaceutical firm Green
Cross, which has been developing its own vaccine, will operate the
factory at Hwasun.
“Our vaccine still requires
further clinical tests. We are trying hard to produce it at the
factory at an early date,” a Green Cross spokesman told Agence
France-Presse.
US authorities approved the first
human vaccine, made by the French firm Sanofi Aventis, only in April
2007.
South Korea has culled more than
6.8 million chickens since its latest outbreak began on April 1. The
ministry has reported 42 cases of bird flu at 33 places nationwide
since then.
On Thursday, quarantine
authorities began culling another 1.5 million poultry in the two
southeastern cities of Geongsan and Yangsan, where the potentially
deadly H5N1 virus was confirmed to have caused earlier outbreaks.
--AFP
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