The article opens:
When it comes to treatment, there's good news and bad news about the new H1N1 swine flu strain circling the globe. Two antiviral drugs can squelch it and are currently the best defense, given that a vaccine will not be ready for months. But stocks of Roche's Tamiflu (oseltamivir) and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza (zanamivir) are too small to protect everyone in a worst-case scenario outbreak; health officials also worry that the virus could become resistant to the drugs.Comment: Even in the Spanish flu pandemic, most people who got the flu came down with a self limiting disease. It should be possible to do a lot of good with 250 million courses of antivirals, and of course more can be produced in the next year and during a pandemic if it occurs. This actually seems rather positive, assuming of course that the available drugs are used well. I note that the five students who came down with the new H1N1 flu at my university were all reported to have received treatment. The incidence is at a low enough level that the antivirals used now can be replaced. And indeed, the H1N1 was identified in Mexico due to a cluster of serious cases in young adults, and it is expected that a new pandemic if it occurs would be most serious in young adults. Still, allocating the drug to the students at the most expensive private university in the United States does not seem a good harbinger of things to come. JaD
How many doses might be needed during a pandemic depends on how severe it is and how the drugs are used; so far, countries have stockpiled roughly 250 million courses of antivirals. By comparison, the 1918–19 flu pandemic sickened at least 800 million people.
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