MEXICO CITY – The Mexican government announced on Monday that it received the first 865,000 doses of vaccine against the AH1N1 flu virus and that authorities will begin inoculating pregnant women in their third trimester and health care personnel this week.

Mexico, where the swine flu outbreak began, to date has registered 573 deaths and 64,322 infections.

“This vaccine is going to be monitored by (state-owned) Laboratorios de Biologicos y Reactivos de Mexico,” Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova told Efe.

He said that the vaccine is the same one that is being administered in the United States, Canada, Spain, France and Britain, and so it is one of the best in the world.

Before being distributed, the vaccine will be reviewed this week by federal inspectors, he said.

Cordova said that authorities already have “a distribution program to the different institutions with the two priority groups that are going to be vaccinated in mind, who are health care personnel and pregnant women.”

The states that will receive the most doses of the vaccine are those that have larger populations, including the Federal District (Mexico City and its environs), Mexico and Veracruz.

On Dec. 7 “it is very probable” that another 650,000 doses of the vaccine will arrive in Mexico, and around Dec. 20 another batch will arrive that will bring the total delivered to Mexico to 7 million doses, the minister added.

In mid-January, 18 million more doses will be received, and it is hoped to be able to administer it to “the entire general population,” after the higher-risk groups are attended to, among whom are people with diseases such as diabetes, emphysema and other respiratory ailments that put their lives in danger if they contract AH1N1.

Finally, Cordova asked health care institutions who receive the vaccine to establish the necessary control mechanisms to allow tracking of the dispensation of it and prevent it from going to groups who are not at higher risk.

Mexico expects by February 2010 to have received a total of 30 million doses of the flu vaccine from the Sanofi Aventis and GlaxoSmithKline labs.

Authorities are forecasting a resurgence of the epidemic between mid-December and the end of next January. EFE