JAKARTA, The Jakarta Health Office has distributed 73,000 tamiflu capsules to health services and community centers in anticipation of the spreading of swine flu or the influenza A strain of the H1N1 virus, a health official said.
"We have distributed the capsules to health services and community centers," Dr Ida Bagus Nyoman Banjar of the Jakarta Health Office said here on Friday.
Banjar said that up to May 15, Jakarta was still free from the H1N1 virus but his office was tightly supervising potential carriers of the virus.
"We have prepared three reference hospitals, namely RS Persahabatan, RSPAD Gatot Subroto and RSPI Sulianti Saroso," Banjar said. In the meantime, PT Bio Farma said recently it was ready to develop swine flu (H1N1) vaccines if the government asked it to do so.
"Bio Farma has already obtained samples of the Mexican strain of the virus from the World Health Organization for the production on a small scale of the vaccines," Bio Farma president director Isa Mansyur said on Monday. He said the production of swine flu vaccines would be carried out in the same way as bird flu (H5N1) vaccines which had been developed previously.
Mansyur said at present Bio Farma was developing bird flu vaccines, particularly for seasonal bird flu. He said for the development of bird flu vaccines his company had obtained virus samples from the WHO through the National Institute for Biological Standardization of Britain.
Mansyur said at the beginning, the development of the bird flu vaccines was carried out with high quality chicken eggs to produce measles vaccines. He said the technological facilities needed to produce flu vaccines for humans were the same as those for bird flu where the type of its virus development could be changed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) had up to May 14, 2009 registered 6,497 swine flu cases in 33 countries with 65 dead victims, or about one percent.
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