Bird Flu May Be Developing Drug Resistance

Pingular writes "The virus currently causing bird flu in humans may be developing resistance to the only drug that can so far combat the infection. From the article: 'A previous paper in the journal Nature described a single case of drug resistance in a patient being treated for avian flu. However, in this case the patient had been given low doses of Tamiflu before becoming infected, as a family member had been stricken. Lead researcher Dr Jeremy Farrar described the latest findings as "very worrying" - but said they were not surprising.'"

Comments

Tamiflu

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Tamiflu was never expected to be a completely effective counter to a mutated strain of bird flu. It might help some people for a short time, which is great of course, but we'll still need a tailored vaccine that currently takes a few months to produce if we're going to beat it on a wide scale. This is why the medical profession is so worried about it, and why so much effort is currently focussed on cutting the time from identifying the mutated strain to availability of a matching vaccine.

Re:Tamiflu

[Anonymous Coward]

My girlfriend is a microbiologist with a specialization in human pathogens, so if anybody would be an expert here it is her.

And she says that in the early stages of a bird flu outbreak, Tamiflu is an effective counter to it. Yes at medically useful doses it has a chance of killing you, but that chance is significantly lower than your chance of dying WIHTOUT it.

The problem comes when it reaches the epidemic stage. You see Tamiflu WILL NOT CURE an infection, it only gives the body enough lead time to build up specialized immunity cells to fight off the infection. During this entire period the virus is still active inside the patient, and still replicating (just at a vastly loweer and non-life-threatening rate). The end result is that it turns patients into incubators for the evolution of resistant strains. The more people that take Tamiflu, the higher a chance for a resistant strain to develop.

The horror story of this is that Tamiflu-using patients are STILL contagious, and this is an airborne disease. With flu-like symptoms, there is almost no chance that an infected person will be quarantined in time to prevent them infecting others. As the resistant strains enter the general population, furhter Tamiflu treatments result in even MORE resistant strains being developed. Eventually the amount of Tamiflu required to recover from the virus will be so high that you have a better chance of survival WITHOUT Tamiflu.

And while edpidemiology resources are being devoted to making the Tamiflu patent holder wealthier, they are not being devoted to the creation and production of a brd-flu VACCINE.

And in the end, thanks to Tamiflu and money-hungry politicians, we end up with a new Smallpox.

A much better viewpoint on a potential bird-flu epidemic is to flatly IGNORE Tamiflu, and nip the potential evloution war we cannot win in the bud. Instead devote all the Tamiflu production resources to producing a vaccine for the non-human bird-flu strain, and begin mass vaccination of domestic bird populations. This will slow down the spread of the virus to the human population, as well as giving us a biological base for a human-usable vaccine.

Then when the human jump ACTUALLY occurs, it is a relatively simple matter of biological cut/paste with the human strain to create a human-usable vaccine. The same manufacturing and distributing capacity used for mass domestic bird vaccination can then be easilly switched to human vaccination.

Poof! Bird-flu scare solved, loss of life minized, and all for FAR CHEAPER than the cash we will have to spend (and lose) taking the Tamiflu route.

This has already

[zegebbers]

affected Roche financially more info here .

Armagedon ready for Christmas

[FishandChips]

My understanding is that one problem here is that Tamiflu is currently the only drug of any use. If there is more than one treatment available, then combination treatments can be used and so cut down the rate at which resistance arises.

I guess the reality is that we can't really be sure what will work and what will not work until after the virus has mutated enough to spread from human to human. And let's hope that never happens. Or, if it has to happen, that the mutation weakens the virus enough to keep things small scale.

I'm a little dubious about Tamiflu. A problem with piling up supplies of Tamiflu at home, for example, is that if you get a bug, how can you know without a test that it is the killer bug? The risk is that you may have a standard bug and then mistakenly use your one and only heavy artillery round on the wrong target. After that, you are foobarred.

Possible alternative

[fionbio]

Arbidol (in Russian) is virtually unknown outside Russia, while it seems that it was shown to be able to defeat bird flu virus. For some discussions in English, look e.g. here.

I've heard that Tamiflu is preferred for political reasons. Maybe there's actually something wrong with Arbidol, but here in Moscow they claim that Arbidol can cure bird flu in their rather widespread advertisements and aren't driven to court for that.