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[H/T combat_boots]Image of boxes of prescription medicine Tamiflu at link Tamiflu fills are at a 10-time high for this time of year, according to GoodRx.com. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images America is facing a shortage of four key medications used for common illnesses in children as virus season comes back in full force.Officials have declared a shortage of first-line antibiotics amoxicillin and Augmentin, which are used to treat bacterial infections. Tamiflu, the most common flu medication in the US, and albuterol, an inhaler for asthma and to open airways in the lungs, are also in short supply, according to the American Society...

[H/T combat_boots]Hospitals are filling up all across America, and there are extremely alarming shortages of some of our most important medications. Health authorities are warning that RSV, the flu and COVID are combining to create a “tripledemic”, and there are simply not enough medications to go around. Personally, I am most concerned about RSV. It is spreading like wildfire from coast to coast, and we are being told that very young children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable. I wrote an entire article about the RSV outbreak earlier this month, and since that time things have gotten even worse. Our...

Lost star Danial Dae Kim has claimed anti-malaria medication is a ‘game-changer’ in his recovery from coronavirus, after revealing he’d tested positive. (Please read full article at link)

A nice catch from our friends at Grabien, who got it from Ace [update] and who had to go all the way back to 2005 to find this nugget and the contemporaneous coverage at the NYT. At the time, the US prepared for a predicted epidemic of the avian flu, also known as H5N1, of global proportions. The virus had been identified for 18 years by that time, but by the end of 2004 had only resulted in 36 deaths and 50 known cases over the prior two years, according to WHO data. In 2005, the number of cases would...

Texas teacher named Heather Holland, aged 38, died of complications from the flu after she decided to give up medical treatment because she considered the 116 dollar Tamiflu "too expensive." The complications from flu-like disease led a 38-year-old teacher to the hospital where she died after a septic shock. The cost of the medicine that was prescribed is $116. Heather Holland, of Weatherford, Texas, reportedly fell ill last Monday and two days later was diagnosed with the flu. According to Fox News, doctors prescribed Tamiflu, an antiviral drug that costs approximately $116. However, according to a statement by Holland's husband...

The latest data — for the week ending Jan. 6 — suggest the season may be peaking right now, the CDC’s director, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, told reporters Friday. But she warned that many more people will be infected before the season is over. There’s a difference between an active flu season — when a large number of people get sick — and a severe season, when the numbers of people hospitalized for flu or who die from the infection are unusually high. It can be hard to tell in real time where a flu season will fall on the severity...

Murrieta began feeling sick last Sunday, and was sent home from her job at a warehouse to get some rest. ... "My daughter called and said that Joie was sent home early on Sunday after working a few hours at the warehouse because she was really sick, and that she went home to rest," Gonzales said. On Monday, her sister took her to an urgent care clinic, where they diagnosed Murrieta with the flu and sent her home with medicine. "They got there in the morning and waited for a while, then they told her she had the flu and...

South-central Pennsylvania has been clobbered by a nasty cold, flu, or combination thereof for all of this brief new year. So much so that the state is listed as "widespread" on the flu map published by the Weather Channel. I get that. What I don't get is why it took my adult son nearly twelve hours to obtain a Z-pack. He did the responsible thing by calling his primary physician (a truly unmercenary practitioner, who works solo and sees many of the poor who others shun) early this morning...around 10 AM. The overworked physicians office--I did say this flu thing...

Clinical trial results are being routinely withheld from doctors, undermining their ability to make informed decisions about how to treat patients, an influential parliamentary committee has claimed. MPs have expressed "extreme concern" that drug manufacturers appear to only publish around 50% of completed trial results and warned that the practice has "ramifications for the whole of medicine". Their conclusions have emerged in a public accounts committee report which examined the Department of Health's decision to spend £424m on stockpiling the flu drug Tamiflu, before writing off £74m because of poor record keeping. … A review by the non-profit Cochrane Collaboration...

LONDON – British researchers say there is little evidence Tamiflu stops complications in healthy people who catch the flu, though public health officials contend the swine flu drug reduces flu hospitalizations and deaths.

The World Health Organization tried this week to dampen fears about mutations seen in the swine flu virus in several countries, noting that both mutations had been found in very few people. A change that created Tamiflu resistance has been found in about 75 people around the world, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief flu adviser to the W.H.O.’s director general. Two clusters, in cancer units at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and a hospital in Wales, were both among patients whose immune systems had been severely suppressed by cancer treatment; some had had their bone marrow, which produces...

4 at Duke get drug-resistant H1N1 By KEITH UPCHURCH DURHAM -- Four patients at Duke University Medical Center, all from North Carolina, have tested positive for a type of swine flu that's resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu, and three have died, health officials announced Friday at a news conference in Raleigh. The fourth patient, a woman, is still a patient at Duke and ''is doing much better,'' they said. Although the four had the H1N1 virus, they all had other medical problems, so it's uncertain if the swine flu caused their deaths, they said. All four were in an...

Health officials say a Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu has spread between hospital patients. Five patients on a unit treating people with severe underlying health conditions at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff were infected. Three appear to have acquired the infection in hospital. They are thought to be the first confirmed cases of person-to-person transmission of a Tamiflu-resistant strain in the world. There have been several dozen reports around the world of people developing resistance to Tamiflu while taking the drug - but they have not passed on the strain to others. Just one possible cases of person-to-person transmission...

Five patients on a unit for people with severe underlying health conditions at the University Hospital of Wales, in Cardiff, were diagnosed with swine flu that is resistant to the drug. Three appear to have acquired the infection in hospital, the National Public Health Service for Wales (NPHS) said. Two of the five have recovered and have been discharged from hospital, one is in critical care and two are being treated on the ward. The service said the resistant strain does not appear to be more severe than the swine flu virus circulating since the spring. All patients on the...

Within minutes, six-year-old Rubjit Thindal went from happily chatting in the back seat of the car to collapsing and dying in her father's arms. "If we had known it was so serious, we would have called 911,'' Kuldip Thindal, Rubjit's distraught mother, said in Punjabi yesterday. "She just had a stomach ache -- she wasn't even crying.'' Rubjit was pronounced dead at hospital barely 24 hours after showing signs of a fever. Later, doctors told her parents she had the H1N1 influenza virus. She is believed to be the youngest person in Canada with the virus to have died.

Russian crime gangs are making millions by selling counterfeit Tamiflu online to Britons woried about swine flu, an internet security firm has claimed. Anxious residents who fear they may not be able to obtain the drug through the NHS could be funding organised crime abroad as well as putting themselves at risk of identity fraud when they buy the potentially useless drugs.

G.'s young son was recently ill with H1N1, but no pharmacy in the city where he lives had liquid Tamiflu in stock. (Even the federal government released its stockpile not long ago.) He writes that nearly every pharmacy he called turned him down. Then he learned that the liquid can be made from Tamiflu capsules by pharmacists, or even by parents at home. Why didn't the pharmacy staff, or his doctor, tell him this? He writes: When his H1N1-induced fever spiked at 104, I brought my 16-month-old son to the pediatrician, who promptly prescribed Tamiflu.When I arrived at CVS, I...

Can anyone shed light on this? My wife is a preschool teacher and one of her students was diagnosed with the swine flu. The child's mother told the teachers that her doctor had to charge her full fee for the flu test and the pharmacy wouldn't take her legitimate insurance for the child's Tamaflu prescription due to the government taking control of the flu "epidemic" or something to that affect. My wife called her pharmacist to ask her about it and we didn't get a lot of information but the short answer had the word confiscation in it and although...

I follow this map every year, it usually doesn't even start up until Novemeber, they started it early this year, and it's worse than I've ever seen it, the peak is usually Jan/Feb for flu ... See map HERE

A Minneapolis company's product could help resolve a shortage of liquid tamiflu, an antiviral medication used to treat flu symptoms that is easy for children to take. The shortage came about because of an increased demand for Tamiflu following outbreaks of H1N1 . To meet the demand, drugmaker Roche started concentrating on making capsule, instead of liquid, versions of the drug. That's because the company can make 25 courses of Tamiflu in capsule form in the same amount of time it takes to make one course of liquid Tamiflu. Children, and adults who have trouble swallowing faced a shortage of...