EU welcomes Hungary's progress on bird flu vaccine

BRUSSELS, Mar 15 (Reuters) The European Commission today welcomed news that a Hungarian drug producer has been given a licence to distribute a vaccine it is developing to protect people against the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu.

''The Commission welcomes all progress towards development of human vaccines against H5N1,'' spokesman Philip Tod told a regular briefing.

Any vaccine must be approved by the European Union's European Medicines Evaluation Agency before it can be sold across the 25-nation bloc, Tod said.

Hungary yesterday said it had become the first country to produce a vaccine in industrial quantities after domestic drug producer Omninvest received a temporary distribution licence for a vaccine it was developing.

A number of companies are working on vaccines to counter the H5N1 virus, which has killed around 100 people since late 2003.

Today, Denmark became the latest EU member state to find its first case of the highly pathogenic H5 bird flu virus in a wild fowl, but it remained unclear whether the case was the deadly H5N1 strain.

Reuters SHR BS1837