Health experts and drugs companies on Friday urged rich countries to come up with public funding to spur development of a human vaccine against bird flu and a pandemic strain of the virus that could kill millions of people around the world within months.
"We would hope that one of the major messages from this meeting to governments, to support vaccine testing, is going to get across," the World Health Organisation's senior flu specialist Klaus Stoehr told journalists after a meeting at the WHO.
Stoehr said that the gathering of 50 top executives from pharmaceutical companies, public health regulators and government officials had agreed to boost co-operation on the issue.
But he warned that private industry alone could not invest about 11 million euros needed in the short term to develop the candidate vaccine needed to inoculate six to seven billion people world-wide in an emergency.
"Without money nothing is going to move with the pandemic vaccine," Stoehr said, emphasising that 90 percent of the production capacity was in industrialised countries.
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