Costs force closure of vaccine lab

Norway is closing the laboratories that did the work on which New Zealand's meningococcal B vaccine is based.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health's internationally respected vaccine research group has been axed because it is too expensive to run.

The group developed the vaccine which has been used as the basis for New Zealand's $200 million immunisation programme.

The New Zealand form of the vaccine, MeNZB, was a variation on the Norwegian vaccine.

A protein in it was changed to specifically combat the strain of meningococcal B bacterium that hit New Zealand in 1981 and has been at epidemic levels for the past 13 years.

The public health institute (FHI) told an Oslo newspaper, Aftenposten, that it needed to cut costs. It said developing vaccines had become so resource-intensive that few nations could do it alone any more.

"Now the work is done, by and large, by big international concerns," said FHI director Geir Stene-Larsen.

He said these massive firms were not always interested in small countries that provided little commercial reward, and it was for precisely this reason that Norway was left to cope with a meningitis B epidemic alone in the late 1970s.

After about 6000 people fell ill and 500 died, most of them teenagers, FHI researchers created a vaccine.

From 1988 to 1991, 180,000 junior high school students were inoculated and the disease faded away in the course of the 1990s.

The FHI vaccine research group had developed a variant to fight a meningitis epidemic in New Zealand that was far worse than the one Norway faced, senior researcher Einar Rosenqvist told the newspaper.

"We have also made a vaccine for use in Africa," Mr Rosenqvist said. "It can give long-term protection against cerebrospinal meningitis.

"But it will likely never be produced: People in Africa do not make up a market. They have no money, they just get sick."

Dr Stene-Larsen said if Norway were to face such a crisis again the options would be to buy into a pharmaceutical firm or "build up our own system again".

But Mr Rosenqvist said that a small country with only five million people did not provide much incentive for big drug companies to develop a specific one-off vaccine.

Professor Lars Haaheim, at the Influenza Centre at the University of Bergen, and Mr Rosenqvist agreed with the FHI that Norway was not capable of producing sufficient vaccine to protect the country against any global pandemic, such as the next big influenza epidemic, and would need to find a commercial ally.

He said research groups such as the one being closed should get the opportunity to create pilot vaccines against illnesses that may not have great commercial interest.

"It would be a real Norwegian helping hand to a world where unanswered questions are lining up for a reply," Prof Haaheim said.

- NZPA