More than two dozen pharmaceutical companies are racing against the clock to test, produce and ship more than a billion doses of swine-flue vaccines to anxious populations worldwide bracing for a second wave of infection.
But even if things proceed smotthly, delivery will not keep up with demand as the northern hemisphere enters the autumn and winter flu season, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned.
Initial estimates that the pharmaceutical industry could crank out 94 million doses a week beginning in October have been slashed due to poorer than expected yields from the so-called "seed virus" strains developed by WHO - approved laboratories.
According to the global health authority, 25 drug companies have announced their intention to make the vaccines.
Five of those firms will account for more than 80 per cent of production: Sanofi -Pasteur in France, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline in Britain, Baxter in the United States, and the Swiss group Novartis.
Significant numbers of vaccines should start to arrive within five to six weeks, they say.
Never in history has there been an attempt to vaccinate so many people in so short a period of time.
Immune-boosting drugs did not even exist in 1918, when a far more virulent progenitor of the type - A (H1N1) virus claimed upward of 40 million lives.
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