The UK Department of Health has announced that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has agreed to a flu vaccination program recommended by a committee of independent experts that will provide MedImmune’s Fluenz intranasal vaccine to all children aged 2 to 17 at no cost. Fluenz is known as FluMist in the US. Asthmatic children and those with other risk factors were already eligible to receive the vaccine.
The department acknowledges that it does not currently have enough vaccine for complete implementation of the program, and the earliest it could actually supply the vaccine to all 9 million children eligible would be 2014. According to The Guardian, the program would also require the NHS to hire 1,000 additional school nurses to administer the vaccine, and the department is considering asking parents to vaccinate their own children.
The program is estimated to cost upwards of £100 million per year and to result in 2,000 fewer deaths and 11,000 fewer hospitalizations per year.
Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies noted, “There are significant challenges to delivering a program that requires up to nine million children to be vaccinated during a six week period, and we will look at the recommendations in detail to decide how best to develop and deliver the program.”
Read the Department of Health press release.
Read the Guardian article.
