By Stephanie Nebehay and Laura MacInnis GENEVA, April 25 (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) is considering building a stockpile of up to 60 million vaccine doses to be used by developing nations to counter any influenza pandemic, its top bird flu official said on Wednesday. The stockpile would address demands from countries led by Indonesia and Thailand who want benefits for sharing samples of the deadly H5N1 virus which are then used to develop commercial vaccines, the WHO's David Heymann said. Developing countries have suggested that a WHO stockpile should cover roughly 1 percent of their populations, often "essential workers" such as hospital staff and police, he said. "The ballpark figure for a global stockpile, to be administered by WHO, is 40 to 60 million doses. It is very feasible," Heymann, assistant WHO director-general for communicable diseases, told Reuters on the sidelines of a WHO meeting on increasing access to pandemic influenza vaccines. While bird flu is mainly an animal disease, experts fear it could mutate into a form that can be spread easily among people, triggering a possible pandemic which could kill millions. The virus has killed more than 180 people since 2003. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said that the global manufacturing capacity for a trivalent pandemic vaccine, covering three strains of virus, was about 500 million doses per year. For a single strain vaccine that rises to 1.5 billion. "This is still not enough for a world of well over 6 billion people," she told the high-level meeting in Geneva. "Present manufacturing capacity is woefully inadequate to meet global demand," Chan said. "The issue of access to vaccines has acquired an urgency that we cannot fail to address." FAIR SHARE The sharing of samples is deemed vital to see if viruses have mutated, become drug resistant or grown more transmissible. But Indonesia and Thailand -- two of the nations worst hit by bird flu -- have protested that commercial drugmakers were using samples from developing countries to make costly vaccines that affected countries would not be able to afford. Viroj Tangcharoensathien of Thailand's public health ministry, speaking on behalf of developing nations, said poor countries must be given special consideration in any pandemic. "We need ethical leadership to have equitable allocation of vaccines," he said in a speech. "I call for it to be based on health needs, not based on capacity to pay." The one-day WHO meeting is expected to recommend that the WHO's annual World Health Assembly of all 193 member states endorse the stockpile idea next month. But questions remain, including how it would be funded and the criteria for its use. Indonesia in December refused to share samples of the H5N1 virus without guarantees they would not be used to make vaccines that will profit a company or another country. But it agreed last month to send samples "immediately" to the U.N. agency in return for better access to vaccines for developing countries. Indonesia has still not sent them, senior WHO officials said. Asked if the samples would be forthcoming soon, health ministry official Widjaja Lukito told Reuters in Geneva: "It is under intense and close consideration by the government."
