The U.K.’s health system will face the biggest challenge in its 61-year history when it attempts to immunize more than 60 million people against swine flu this year, doctors and public health officials said.

“We haven’t done mass vaccination like this before,” said Laurence Buckman, chairman of the British Medical Association’s General Practitioners’ Committee.

An estimated 295,000 people in the U.K. contracted flu-like illnesses in the four weeks that ended Aug. 2, and 36 Britons are known to have died from the H1N1 pandemic virus since it first appeared in Mexico in April, according to the Department of Health. As many as 65,000 people in the country could die from H1N1, England’s Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson estimated last month.

The U.K. won’t be able to inoculate its 61.6 million residents against swine flu before the flu season reaches its peak next winter, said a leader of the group of doctors who will give most of the shots.

The country’s National Health Service will need until next year to complete the vaccination program if it begins in the autumn as expected, said Maureen Baker, honorary secretary of the Royal College of General Practitioners. Seasonal flu peaks in early January in the U.K., according to the group’s data.

“It’s very reasonable that it will go into next year,” Baker, who leads pandemic planning for the professional group, said last week in an interview. “Whatever service you use to administer the vaccine may well be under pressure dealing with flu anyway or indeed have a reasonably high absenteeism rate from work on account of people being ill themselves.”

Source/Full Story: Bloomberg.com

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