Posted on 11/24/2003 9:44:13 PM PST by Calpernia
BEIJING - China is ready to begin human trials on an experimental SARS (news - web sites) vaccine, a government official said Monday, but the World Health Organization (news - web sites) cautioned that a safe and effective vaccine was likely still a long way off.
"This vaccine will protect the body," Yin Hongzhang, head of China's State Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites)'s biological product section, told The Associated Press. "We cannot tell yet whether it will be successful in humans, but we can say it is effective in animals, especially monkeys."
The agency is looking for volunteers for the trials, which are scheduled to begin next month. It wasn't clear how long the tests would last, Yin said.
Researchers around the world have been racing to come up with a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome, which first emerged a year ago in the southern province of Guangdong.
The flu-like disease, which scientists say is caused by a coronavirus, killed 774 people and sickened more than 8,000 before subsiding in July. In China, 349 people died.
The WHO has said a vaccine is at least two years away. Julie Hall, the SARS team leader in the agency's Beijing office, said the WHO has not been involved in China's latest effort, which she called "one step along a very long path in terms of the vaccine development."
"There are many, many hurdles to go, and many vaccines in the past have fallen at these hurdles," Hall said. "It's still a long, long way off, to develop a safe and effective vaccine."
She added that it was important that China shared the results of its tests with scientists in other countries to foster cooperation, peer review and verifiable adherence to safety precautions.
Earlier this month, officials at WHO's Geneva headquarters lauded global efforts to find a vaccine. But, like Hall, they said the immediate future must also be guarded.
"Efforts to develop a safe and effective human vaccine against SARS and the level of international collaboration are very encouraging," Dr. Lee Jong-wook, WHO's director-general, said then.
"But in the immediate term," Lee said, "we must be ready to manage a possible resurgence of SARS through the control measures that work — surveillance, early diagnosis, hospital infection control, contact tracing and international reporting."
Development of the Chinese vaccine — which uses purified samples of the dead SARS virus — began at the end of April, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Tests on monkeys have already been conducted by the Beijing-based Kexing Bioproduct Co., which developed the vaccine, Xinhua said.
Yin was quoted by Xinhua as saying that his administration decided to speed up the vaccine testing and was expected to approve clinical trials by the end of the year.
China has produced about 1,400 shots of the vaccine, and another 20,000 will be packaged and inspected by quality control experts, the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily reported.
News of the experimental vaccine received widespread coverage in Chinese state media Monday. The announced plans for the tests came as the weather turned cold to northern China, and as people in Beijing, the world's hardest-hit city, prepared for the possible return of the virus.
The country's last SARS patients were discharged from a Beijing hospital Aug. 16, the government said. Since then, there have been no clinically confirmed or even suspected SARS cases on the mainland, it said.
Yikes, I'm glad I don't live in China. I don't trust their meaning of the word volunteer.
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