The World Health Organisation launched an emergency plan aimed at expanding industry's ability to produce seasonal vaccines from the current 350 million doses a year to levels that might be required to protect the whole of the world's population -- about 6.7 billion people, officials said.
"We are presently several billion doses short of the amount of pandemic influenza vaccine we would need to protect the global population," said Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO's vaccine research initiative.
"This situation could lead to a global health crisis," she added.
Current attempts to build up vaccine production would only achieve enough production capacity for 780 million doses in an emergency by 2009, Kieny explained.
"At the end, the ideal situation would be to immunise everybody who could need it, and potentially that could be the global population," Kieny said at a news conference.
The pharmaceutical industry and governments would not be able to produce enough doses of a vaccine designed to deal with a pandemic strain unless they already have sufficient industrial capacity available to make vaccines that guard against seasonal strains of flu, according to the WHO.
"The reason this is an emergency is because the world is unprepared should there be a pandemic," said David Heymann, acting WHO chief of communicable diseases.
"We're calling urgent attention to the fact that we need to start now to increase that capacity, in the event that there should be a pandemic in the next five years, the next 10 or the next 30 years," he told journalists.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2006