Posted on 10/14/2005 2:05:41 PM PDT by paulat
Bird flu virus shows signs of evading newest drug
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
1 hour, 22 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The feared avian influenza virus is showing signs it can evade the drug considered the first line of defense against bird flu, researchers They found so-called resistant strains in a Vietnamese girl who recovered from a bird flu infection after being treated with Tamiflu. They also found evidence she was directly infected by her brother and not by chickens, a rare case of human-to-human transmission of the virus.
When bacteria and viruses develop resistance to a drug, it means higher doses of the drug are needed to eradicate or control an infection. Ultimately it means the drug will stop working.
This has happened with many antibiotics, starting with penicillin, and is common among AIDS drugs.
The finding illustrates the need to find and use other drugs to treat influenza and to work quickly to develop a vaccine, the researchers said.
"I don't think we need to panic based on this finding," Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
But the report, to be published in the journal Nature next week, is bad news for doctors around the world who already have precious little in the arsenal against bird flu should it become a human disease.
"This is the first line of defense," Kawaoka said. "It is the drug many countries are stockpiling, and the plan is to rely heavily on it."
The H5N1 strain of avian influenza is considered by health experts to be the biggest single disease threat to the world. Since surfacing in Hong Kong in 1997, it has spread in flocks of poultry across Asia and is now in Turkey.
It does not yet move easily from birds to humans but it has infected 117 people in four Asian countries and has killed 60 of them, according to the World Health Organization.
WHO believes it will eventually acquire the ability to move easily from human to human and that when it does, it will cause a pandemic that will sweep the world in weeks or months and kill millions if not tens of millions of people.
STOCKPILING SUPPLIES
Countries are stockpiling supplies of Tamiflu, an antiviral drug known generically as oseltamivir invented by Gilead Sciences and made and marketed by Swiss drug giant Roche Holdings.
They are to a lesser degree buying up supplies of Relenza, developed by Australia's Biota Holdings and marketed by GlaxoSmithKline. Known generically as zanamivir, this drug is also effective against avian flu but is given via the nose and considered less desirable than a pill like Tamiflu.
An older flu drug called amantadine is already considered to be of little use against H5N1 avian influenza. Work is proceeding on a vaccine but flu vaccines take months to make and cannot be formulated until after an epidemic has begun because they must use the precise strain of virus circulating.
Kawaoka, who is also at the University of Tokyo, worked with colleagues in Japan and Vietnam to analyze samples of virus taken from a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl, called "patient 1," who recovered from an H5N1 infection last March.
"Patient 1 had not had any known direct contact with poultry, but had cared for her 21-year-old brother (patient 2) while he had a documented H5N1 virus infection," Kawaoka and colleagues wrote in their report,
She had been given Tamiflu three days before she became ill, and then was treated with the drug when it failed to prevent her infection.
Kawaoka's team found several types of H5N1 virus in the girl's sample, some of which had developed genetic mutations to make Tamiflu virtually worthless against it.
"It is a mixture," he said. "Within the mixture we found virus that is highly, highly resistant. When you look at the virus as a whole, it is partially resistant," Kawaoka said.
"I think what is important here is that the vast majority of H5N1 viruses are still very sensitive to oseltamivir," Kawaoka said.
"Although our findings are based on a virus from only a single patient, they raise the possibility that it might be useful to stockpile zanamivir as well as oseltamivir in the event of an H5N1 influenza pandemic," the researchers wrote.
And it will be important to test the virus regularly to see if it is changing and becoming resistant to drugs, they said.
EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!
They also found evidence she was directly infected by her brother and not by chickens, a rare case of human-to-human transmission of the virus.
I thought that when this thing goes "human to human" in terms of transmission it was time to grease the wheels on the death carts and start digging the mass graves on the outskirts of town.
Couple of points:
1) I just finished the best-seller on the 1918 pandemic. Scary.
2) On the other hand, I am also old enough to vaguely remember the Swine Flu Panic.
sorry but the guy that was supposed to ping you called in sick....LAST WEEK.
I have read that the ChiComs and their Asian allies have been bootlegging Tamiflu and feeding it to their bird stocks to prevent and treat cases of H5N1. Imagine that! The ChiComs breaking patent laws.
The WHO / UN is "deeply saddened" but I doubt you'll ever see any report of this in the pro-ChiCom MSM.
Now I wonder where that resistance could have come from???
Morons!
"I thought that when this thing goes "human to human" in terms of transmission it was time to grease the wheels on the death carts and start digging the mass graves on the outskirts of town."
Not quite- there's a pandemic chart and the level just below pandemic provides for rare human-to-human transmissions. So we're knocking on the door but it hasn't been opened yet.
It will be time to panic when we have the public health equivalent of the stewardess in the movie "Airplane" asking "does anyone here know how to fly a plane?"
Just don't order the fish.
One might want to look at how Colloidal Silver works.
I am not making this up...at a large company I worked for a few years ago, there was a guy on my floor who was blue from colloidal silver.
VERY freaky!!!
A cursory google search showed a remarkable uniformity of thought, outside the kook fringe, that colliodal silver was worthless as a disease fighting agent.
That is not uncommon side effect. Too much silver in the bloodstream will turn you blue since the colloidal particals are too big to flush out of your system. Must be taken in very small doses but very effective!
Here is a site where you can see the effects of someone using colloidal silver.
http://together.net/~rjstan/rose2.html
The poor guy worked over-night (our whole building didn't have over-night shifts...but they made exception for him).
One night I was working REALLY late on a project, and he came up and asked me a question. I had never seen him before...luckily I didn't screech, or anything, but he must have seen the look in my eyes.
WHO: Millions will die, when not if.
Ping the thread and the linked reply.
The same thing happened to a political candidate in Montana.
He didn't win!
A caller to Pat Gray's show earlier this week (which I know Gunner heard) said this exact same thing - that Tamiflu doesn't do squat with regard to bird flu.
Makes me wonder how she knew.
Also makes me wonder if I should take a flu shot this season, since a) it always makes me sick, and b) it sounds like it won't prevent bird flu anyway.
And I wonder (still I wonder) who'll stop the rain.
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