Children swine flu deaths spike in US

October 31, 2009 12:28:50 PM

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The United States will release its entire stock of children's Tamiflu antivirals, a top health official said Friday, as the pediatric swine flu toll spiked well above the annual toll for kids from seasonal flu.

"Up until now, there have been 114 laboratory-confirmed deaths among children," the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, told a press conference, referring to swine flu.

The highest pediatric death toll from seasonal flu in the past three years was 88.

Along with the spike in child (A)H1N1 flu deaths, the US has seen "more hospitalizations in people under the age of 65 than in most entire flu seasons," Frieden said.

Federal health authorities were releasing the entire US stock of liquid Tamiflu antivirals for children, Frieden said.

Some 300,000 doses of liquid Tamiflu were released at the beginning of the month, and "we are now releasing an additional 234,000 courses from the strategic national stockpile," he said.

"That is the entire supply from the stockpile."

Frieden said the supply of (A)H1N1 vaccine was increasing steadily, with 10.5 million more doses ready to be shipped to state health authorities in the space of a week, boosting the total available to 26.6 million doses.

"The gap between supply and demand is closing," he said.

But the increase in vaccine availability has not yet been felt at the local level, and in Montgomery County, just outside Washington, health officials said they were canceling three innoculation clinics scheduled for next month.

"We've been told that supplies should become more regular but it hasn't reached the local level yet and I'm not sure it's reached the state level," Mary Anderson, a local health spokeswoman in Maryland, told AFP.

"When we planned these clinics four or five weeks ago, we were working under the assumption that vaccine supply was going to be plentiful," Anderson said.

"But we learned our lesson. We haven't been getting the supplies we expected, so we have to cancel the clinics."

Montgomery County health authorities have given out around 8,800 doses of vaccine to a population of about one million.

In mid-October, vaccine manufacturers warned of production slow-downs and health officials said supply would fall about 10 million doses short of the 40 million doses they had expected to have by the end of this month.

More than 5,700 people have died of swine flu worldwide since the virus was first uncovered in April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Friday.

The biggest rise was recorded in the Americas region, where 4,175 deaths have now been reported to the WHO.