Avian Flu Update

Man, this looming threat really scares me. I wrote at length about the risk of an avian flu outbreak causing a pandemic among humans worldwide in a previous posting, and now there are more bad news.

Apparently, a strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus is showing resistance to Tamiflu, the only antiviral drug that seems to have any effect on the virus and the one that countries around the world are now stockpiling to fend off the looming threat.

"There are now resistant H5N1 strains appearing, and we can't totally rely on one drug (Tamiflu)," William Chui, honorary associate professor with the department of pharmacology at the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, told Reuters.

While the H5N1 virus has so far always passed directly from bird to human, health experts have warned that it is just a matter of time before it mutates into a form that is easily transmissible between people. When that happens, it may result in as many as 150 million human deaths.

Scientific reports say that resistance to anti-flu drugs was growing worldwide:

In places such as China, drug resistance exceeded 70 percent, suggesting that drugs like amantadine and rimantadine will probably no longer be effective for treatment or as a preventive in a pandemic outbreak of flu, the reports said.

So, we have no built-in immunity against this virus at all, and the virus seems to be quickly adapting to the only drug we have that seems to be effective. That means that if you get sick and you're lucky enough to get treated (the stockpiles of Tamiflu are totally inadequate to treat the predicted millions of patients,) you might die anyway because the virus has adapted to the drug.

Can this get any worse?