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GENEVA, March 19 (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday it would deliver millions of H1N1 vaccine doses to about a dozen countries in Africa in coming weeks.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, as well as Kenya and South Africa are among those slated to receive vaccine doses by May, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.
"In the next weeks, 10-15 countries will receive vaccine. We are doing what we can to limit the effects of H1N1 on the African continent," Hartl told a news briefing.
The shipment for Nigeria, expected to go in coming days, would contain about 2.8 million doses.
The H1N1 virus continues to spread in West Africa, including Senegal and Ivory Coast, although clinical data is limited about its severity, the WHO said in its latest update a week ago.
"Cameroon and Senegal have been bumped up as a priority because we know there is community transmission (of the virus)," WHO spokeswoman Karen Mah told Reuters on Friday.
Togo was the first African country to receive H1N1 vaccine from the WHO on Feb. 27, she said.
Eastern and southern Africa likely had an earlier peak in pandemic influenza activity at year-end, according to the WHO.
To date, the United Nations agency has delivered 3 million vaccine doses to 16 countries, including Afghanistan. Its stocks have been donated by industrialised countries and drug makers.
In all 95 countries which lack access to H1N1 vaccines have requested doses from WHO. Authorities must present distribution plans and ensure that the vaccines are kept in cold storage.
The WHO also said that a review committee of external experts would hold its first meeting in Geneva from April 12-14 to examine the agency's handling of the first influenza pandemic in 40 years, which WHO declared last June.
The pandemic sparked a race to develop new vaccines by drug makers such as GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis , but many people have not taken the vaccine as the outbreak has turned out to be fairly moderate.
Pregnant women and children remain at higher risk of serious complications and should be vaccinated, according to the WHO.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay) Keywords: HEALTH/FLU (geneva.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com; tel,: +41 22 733 38 31)

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By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO, March 18 (Reuters) - Virtually all of the experts who wrote favorably about GlaxoSmithKline Plc's troubled diabetes drug Avandia had financial ties to drug makers, a finding that shows the need for reform of such relationships, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
A team at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, pored through more than 200 scientific studies and commentaries that offered positive opinions about the drug after a May 2007 study suggested Avandia significantly increased the risk of heart attacks.
They found that 94 percent of the authors who defended the drug, known generically as rosiglitazone, had ties to drug companies, and nearly half had financial ties that presented a conflict of interest.
"It was almost three to four times more likely that somebody who had a relationship with a pharmaceutical company had a favorable opinion about the medication," Dr Victor Montori of the Mayo Clinic, whose study appears in the British Medical Journal, said in a telephone interview.
Montori looked at the financial relationships of researchers who had ties with pharmaceutical companies in general, and particularly those who wrote about rosiglitazone or the rival drug pioglitazone, made by Takeda Pharmaceutical Co Ltd under the brand name Actos.
"If you were to look at the proportion of people with favorable opinions, 94 percent of them had a relationship with a pharmaceutical company," Montori said.
"If you were to look at the folks with an unfavorable opinion, 28 percent had a relationship with a pharmaceutical company," he said.

The team checked both disclosures in scientific papers that mentioned Avandia and other papers by the same authors.
About a quarter of those did not report that relationship in the paper that was about Avandia.
"If the public was directly looking at financial relationships in the studies of interest, that information will not be present in a fourth of those studies," Montori said.
The Mayo team's findings "underscore the need for further changes in disclosure procedures in order for the scientific record to be trusted," the researchers wrote.
Glaxo spokeswoman Mary Anne Rhyne defended the drug.
"Of the 202 publications reviewed by the authors, only 10 were original scientific research," she said in a statement.
"Many of the articles reviewed were opinion pieces -- editorials, commentaries or letters. It is important to note that the authors' conclusions do not impugn the validity of the scientific data," she said.
Montori said the results were essentially the same if the researcher had a relationship with the maker of Avandia or the competing drug Actos, although they looked harder at research on Avandia.
"The reason is, it seems, there is a large overlap in the investigators who write opinions about these drugs that are funded by both companies," he said.
Montori said it is not clear whether having financial ties to a drug company influences a researcher's opinion, or whether drug companies seek out investigators who already have a good opinion of their drug and fund their studies.
What is clear, he said, is that drug company ties do appear to influence scientific opinion about the safety of drugs, and this issue may play a role in the debate about a drug's safety.
Rhyne said Glaxo plans to disclose research payments made to healthcare professionals and their institutions starting in the first quarter of 2011. Those will cover payments made to U.S. researchers in 2010, then will be extended to researchers and institutions outside the United States.
Last month two U.S. senators released a report and internal documents from Food and Drug Administration safety reviewers who recommended pulling Avandia from the U.S. market.
The FDA is reviewing data on Avandia and plans to hold a public meeting in July to discuss the risks and benefits of the drug. Meanwhile, the agency says doctors and patients should continue to use Avandia as directed.
Glaxo last month said the scientific evidence did not establish that Avandia increased heart attack risks.
Sales of Avandia, which topped $3 billion in 2006, fell to $1.2 billion in 2009.
(Editing by Maggie Fox and Eric Beech) Keywords: DIABETES AVANDIA/

(julie.steenhuysen@thomsonreuters.com ; +1 312 408 8131)

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By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON, March 18 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators, drug companies, philanthropists and advocates announced a new alliance on Thursday to speed tuberculosis drugs to market, a day after cancer researchers and drugmakers launched a similar initiative.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it will work with drug developers to help them through some of the requirements for testing drugs before they can win approval, with the goal of speeding trials and saving money.
"FDA is absolutely committed to working with partners to speed access to new, safe and highly effective treatments for TB, which continues to mutate and spread," FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said in a statement.
The alliance, called the Critical Path to TB Drug Regimens or CPTR, will test potential combinations of new TB drugs from different companies as they are being developed -- an almost radical approach.
Companies rarely cooperate on having their drugs tested together and usually such combinations are devised by doctors in the field long after drugs are approved. The alliance said it can take as long as 24 years to get approval for new TB drug cocktails under this system.
The new approach echoes initiatives in the 1990s to help speed AIDS drugs to market. AIDS and TB must both be treated with combinations of drugs taken every day -- for months in the case of TB and for life in the case of AIDS.

Partners include the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, the Critical Path Institute, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis , Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, Japan's Otsuka, Novartis, Sequella and Anacor Pharmaceuticals Inc.
"This type of collaboration between the public and the private sector is exactly what's needed to help speed the availability of a shorter and more effective treatment for TB," said Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the global health program at the Gates Foundation.
"A successful drug combination regimen to fight TB could save millions of lives."

Tuberculosis killed 1.8 million people in 2008, or nearly 5,000 people a day. It is caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. More than 2 billion people are infected.
TB can be cured with antibiotics but they must be taken daily for months to be effective. Because people do not always take the drugs as directed, multiple drug-resistant strains called MDR-TB have emerged.
The World Health Organization reported that MDR-TB killed 150,000 people in 2008 and infected 440,000 globally. The WHO said the numbers suggest the hard-to-treat infection is spreading and there is an urgent need for countries to set up labs to fight it.
"I've seen first hand the public health impact and personal tragedy of drug-resistant TB," Hamburg said.

"This creative approach mirrors FDA's own investments in innovative regulatory science that ensures the best new medical technologies -- including combination therapies -- reach patients as soon as possible."
"The CPTR initiative has the commitment of the FDA and regulatory authorities in Europe to help develop and validate improved, safe, and accurate regulatory pathways to test and register combination TB treatments," the group said.
"No single company or institution can do it alone," said Dr. Paul Stoffels of Johnson & Johnson.

(Editing by Chris Wilson) Keywords: TUBERCULOSIS DRUGS/ (Maggie.Fox@ThomsonReuters.com; Washington bureau newsroom 202-898-8492)

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LONDON, March 18 (Reuters) - Martin Mackay, Pfizer's President of PharmaTherapeutics Research & Development, tells Reuters: