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Are youth more susceptible?
A set of activities identified in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) new Global pandemic influenza action plan to increase vaccine supply requires immediate and sustained action and funding, if the world is to be prepared for an influenza pandemic to which there would be almost universal susceptibility.
A report on last winters cases in Turkey seem to indicate that children and youth may be particularly susceptible to the virus.
“To some extent, this reflects the same age distribution observed globally, where 50.5% of cases occurred among people aged <20 years, and it suggests that age-related factors may influence susceptibility to the disease,” the report states.
Meanwhile, WHO reports that, “We are presently several billion doses short of the amount of pandemic influenza vaccine we would need to protect the global population. This situation could lead to a public health crisis,” said Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, Director, WHO Initiative for Vaccine Research. “The Global Action Plan sets the course for what needs to be done, starting now, to increase vaccine production capacity and close the gap. In just three to five years we could begin to see results that could save many lives in case of a pandemic.”
Of the case-patients described in the report, all of those who died in Turkey were teenagers, while all the survivors were younger children, aged three to nine years. “This reflects closely the global situation where the highest case-fatality rate (73%) has been observed in the 10-19-year age group,” the article says.
Turkey was the first country outside Southeast Asia to report human cases. A total of 21 human H5N1 cases had been reported in January on the basis of tests in a Turkish laboratory, but only 12 of these were confirmed by the WHO because the remainder were not confirmed in reference labs recognised by the organisation.
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