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number of counties in the U.S. southeastern state of Florida are considering offering vaccinations against A/H1N1 flu to the general public next week.

Health officials in Broward county said seven clinics around the county would offer A/H1N1 flu vaccines to the general public from next Monday, not just to those in priority groups. With a population of 1.6 million, the county has received 315,100 doses so far.

"We're encouraging priority groups first and then the general public," said Candy Sims, spokeswoman for the county's health department.

The department has given 73,936 vaccinations to the county's 250,000 or so public school students.

But doctors said the vaccine had been available for children and young adults for weeks, yet there was no line of young people at their clinics while senior citizens had been coming in daily asking for the vaccine.

The students' parents are still being slow to sign and return permission so their children can be vaccinated, they explained.

In Palm Beach County, spokesman for the health department Tim O'Connor said the department could decide as early as next week whether to make the vaccine available to everyone.

"We will look at the availability, and in the next two to three weeks we anticipate opening it up to the public," he said.

He said officials in his department were reevaluating their guidelines after seeing their counterparts in Broward County break with the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For now, the CDC recommends giving the vaccine only to people in high-risk groups, including pregnant women, young people between six months and 24 years old and people with underlying health problems such as diabetes.

But some doctors said if health officials waited too long to let everyone get vaccinated, people would lose interest and start to think the crisis is past.

Other doctors believe that the age limits are only a recommendation and the CDC will not withhold the A/H1N1 flu vaccine because it is being given to those in lower-risk groups locally.

Even federal health officials are considering the similar possibility.

"In the coming weeks we'll definitely be at the point where people won't have to go out of their way to find it (vaccine)," said Tom Skinner, spokesman for the CDC.

Meanwhile, local reports in Miami-Dade county said some drugstores had both A/H1N1 flu vaccine for 18 U.S. dollars and regular seasonal flu vaccine for 24.99 dollars.

The county expects vaccines to become available in a week or so at local drugstores.

However, nationwide availability has been lagging. The CDC has so far allocated 61.2 million doses of the vaccine nationwide. That's only slightly more than the CDC's predictions three months ago of how many doses would be available by mid-October.

It means the agency is far from its goal of distributing 195 million doses of the vaccine by the end of the year.

An unknown epidemic caused three deaths and affected more than 100 people in the last few days in the Republic of Congo, the central African country's national laboratory reported on Thursday.

"Three people lost their lives since the epidemic broke out. A little more than 100 patients went to Londela Kayes hospital in Niari district, more than 350 km southwest of Brazzaville," the source said in a statement.

Londela Kayes, a region in the southwest of Congo, bears the brunt of the disease, which has symptoms of diarrhoea, strong fever and vomiting.

The health authorities dispatched a team on the ground to establish the nature of this epidemic.

"It's a flu. We have not yet received the samples which we can use to analyze in order to determine the origin of this disease," an official at the national public health laboratory said, indicating a possibility of A/H1N1 flu outbreak.

"We are just suspecting. In view of the fact that A/H1N1 has already been reported in Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, it's possible that with the movements of businessmen and other state agents, other small regions might have been contaminated," he added.

Congo reported its first case of A/H1N1 flu in October in a Brazzaville private school.

The Congolese authorities have put in place an alert system aided by the World Health Organization since 2008 to allow for quick detection of all forms of flu and to respond quickly