The vaccine was recently approved by the Drug Controller of India and will be available to the public at an affordable price, the President announced while inaugurating the Tenth International Congress on Immunology here.

The President said that even though immunisation was the greatest public health success story of history, it was deplorable that neither new vaccines nor antibiotics were reaching the poorest sections of society which need them most.

On the other hand, the reckless lifestyles of people who indiscriminately use antibiotics were rendering them ineffective, he warned. ``With overuse of antibiotics, even for ordinary ailments like common cold, the immunity of the human body has been put at stake and microbes and viruses have become more and more resistant to such drugs,'' the President said.

``Human diseases, physical and even mental disorders are the results as much of infection caused by microbes as by the living conditions in society,'' the President reminded the distinguished audience of world immunologists.

Environmental conditions in the larger sense of the term covering poverty, malnutrition, insanitation, overindustrialisation, pollution, overpopulation, social conditions, life-style moral deterioration are responsible for disturbing the immune system and producing innumerable diseases, he said. Minister for human resource development and science and technology, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, who presided over the function, said the gathering of bio-technologists should ponder upon each of the challenges facing humanity and join hands to draw strategies for combating the biological scourge. He asked the scientists to touch upon the new horizons of immunology and enthuse young scientists about enormous opportunities in this field.

The secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Manju Sharma, in her welcome address, said the Congress would provide a forum for young scientists to interact with leading immunologists besides debating each other's experiences in the advancement made in immunology. Over 2,000 scientists from 67 countries of the world have assembled here for the Congress which has not been held so far in any developing country in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Meanwhile, several women's groups demanded a halt to research and development of contraceptive vaccines on the eve of the Congress.