GPs expect pressure over flu shots

The Health Ministry has said it hopes to start this year's vaccination programme in about 10 days. File picture

The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners is warning GPs will face pressure from people wanting one of the very limited supply of 50,000 flu vaccines.

Government drug safety agency Medsafe was notified two weeks ago that all of this year's 750,000 vaccination doses were under-strength for one of the three strains predicted to hit New Zealand this winter.

The Ministry of Health and government drug-buying agency Pharmac have obtained about 50,000 doses of full-strength vaccine from another manufacturer but that is not nearly enough.

Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners president Jim Vause, a Blenheim GP, told NZPA today that GPs would face pressure from people wanting themselves or their children vaccinated against the flu.

Dr Vause said it would be a problem deciding who should get the vaccine and GPs would need to be given clear criteria from the Ministry of Health.

"The sorts of people you can think of are those who have particular lung disease or their immune systems are not very functional."

It would be difficult for the Ministry to determine how many people with a particular health issue needed the flu vaccine.

"You can't leave this totally to GPs to do because it's such a big problem and even in a practice population it's not easy."

He said GPs had to be "straight up" and consistent with patients to avoid being pressured. "There are likely to be some problems. We know from experience of say the meningitis B vaccination programme that that occurred in Auckland so we do expect some problems like that."

Dr Vause said influenza was a winter problem in New Zealand and the strain under-strength in the vaccine, A/Wellington/1/2004 (H3N2), had been in New Zealand last year.

Vaccines took about three to six weeks to be effective.

Dr Vause said as the Wellington flu strain had been in New Zealand last year "there will be a significant number of people who are already immune to that section of the vaccine so I don't think it's going to be a huge public health problem".

GPs would recommend people had the vaccine that did effectively cover the other two strains if that was all that was available.

If a decision was made to issue double doses of the first vaccine, that would take a lot of extra time and effort for medical practices.

The faulty vaccine was produced by Sanofi pasteur.

A spokeswoman for them said the problem had been picked up during routine testing. "It will work but perhaps not to the same degree that they expected. It's basically a miscalculation -- it's a human error down the line," she told National Radio today.

Health Minister Annette King said today health officials were trying to find more supplies of the full-strength vaccine and also to see if a double dose of the current vaccine would work.

"We hope that we will know within a week whether we can double the dose. It will depend on its effectiveness and obviously its safety and whether it's operationally possible to do that," she told National Radio.

An extra 750,000 doses of the first vaccine had also been obtained.

Ms King said the Ministry of Health had found out on February 28 there was a problem with the vaccines.

She did not have an estimate of how many people might die from influenza in New Zealand if they did not get the vaccine.

Public Health deputy director Don Matheson said yesterday most people vulnerable to influenza would take priority in getting the 50,000 available full-strength vaccines.

Sanofi pasteur has produced an estimated 28 million under-strength vaccine doses, putting some other southern hemisphere countries in the same boat.

- NZPA