Bird flu Tamiflu resistance expected by the experts

As a response to the suspicion on Tamiflu effects, professors from the University of Michigan say, that despite the cases in Vietnam, the drug works well on patients.

These experts report that they are not sure if the resistant strain is the cause of two patients’ deaths and that they had expected that the bird flu virus H5N1 would develop resistance.-evolve into resistant forms
They believe that the two poor Vietnamese patients’ conditions were not revealed on time and that the disease had gone far in order for the drug to work. Tamiflu showed it’s efficiency in a case of a little girl who had resistant virus and recovered some months ago.

Although it was expected for the virus to evolve into resistant forms, it was not expected that the virus would be resistant from the start.
Tamiflu had been selected over the alternative anti-viral drug relenza, because it is absorbed and disseminated in the body. Relenza will be used as an alternative.

Even though it is still not known if tamiflu would cure people sick with the bird flu virus, countries around the world are stockpiling tamiflu to counter a global-pandemic.

Until now, the spread of the virus from one person to another has been very rare and it is thought that it cannot spread beyond one person. However some scientists are concerned that in the future the H5N1 virus could easily spread from one to another.

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