Mexican President Felipe Calderon wearing a surgical mask as he talks with nurses at a hospital in Uruapan, Michoacan state.

Credit: AFP

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Some developing countries were already planning their own vaccine production programmes. Indonesia, for example, is building research facilities to produce a single vaccine for both the swine and bird flu viruses. Health authorities cannot confirm when they will be able to start making a vaccine, but construction of at least one facility is almost finished.

Pharmaceutical companies and government research institutions in India have similarly agreed this week to explore whether they have the capability and technology to produce a domestic vaccine in case a second wave of A(H1N1) hits later this year.

There is a long way to go, of course, before these countries can equal the production capacity of the developed world. But their willingness to invest in key technologies – spurred, no doubt, by the prospect of growing markets in other developing countries – is welcome.

Their efforts are made easier by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, which is releasing free samples of the A(H1N1) virus essential for vaccine production. This welcome openness of the US authorities stands in contrast to the tight control of intellectual property usually encountered in the global pharmaceutical industry.

Informed reporting

It is not too fanciful to suggest that informed media coverage – helped by instant and comprehensive online reporting – has contributed to the current state of affairs.

Admittedly some headlines have inflated the pandemic's severity, which may have provoked an excessive response from some public authorities. Egypt, for example, has been criticised for its decision to slaughter all its pigs – roughly 300,000 – earlier this month.

But in general, reporting has been responsible and accurate, neither underplaying nor exaggerating the threat, whilst scrutinising issues such as the need to treat the developing world fairly.

It seems that the lessons of earlier pandemics have been well learned. Chan herself is familiar with these; public concern in China over the SARS outbreaks was only exacerbated by attempts to restrict media coverage (see China must do yet more to promote scientific openness). And the WHO, burned by injudicious comments from one of its top officials during the bird flu epidemic, has been more measured in its comments.

There are still lessons to be learned from the current outbreak, such as the time it took Mexican authorities to recognise the new strain, or the lack of adequate diagnostic facilities in many parts of the developing world, particularly in Africa.

But if the case for vigilance remains high, so does that for recognising the critically important role of an informed media in monitoring how public health authorities perform in developed and developing countries alike.

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