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I subscribe to many "alternative health"-type newsletters. Admittedly, many of them give slanted information, and many of them have commercial tie-ins with some potentially-dubious products. So I take everything that I read with a huge grain of salt.
What I've been reading about avian flu and Tamiflu in these newsletters is rather alarming, at least on its surface. The gist of the claim is that Tamiflu has been proven to be ineffective against the avian flu, and that our government is buying up millions of doses of Tamiflu from Roche on the (possibly false) assumption that Tamiflu is an effective remedy for the avian flu. (Another possibility is that our government knows that Tamiflu has no proven track record against avian flu, but that they are making this huge investment just so that it will SEEM as if they're doing SOMETHING to be prepared for the pandemic, if and when it arrives on our shores.)
Some reasons that I don't necessarily believe the alternative health newsletter claims follow:
1-There have been no large human studies of the effectiveness of Tamiflu against avian flu, mostly because there have been relatively few human cases of avian flu to study.
2-My understanding of avian flu is that human victims start to show symptoms within two days of exposure, and that pneumonia develops very quickly, often on the same day that symptoms of infection start to show. It may be that the Tamiflu was not given to the patients soon-enough to keep the deadly symptoms from developing. In "normal" usage, Tamiflu is supposed to be given within two days of exposure to the flu. Is it possible that it's already too late for Tamiflu dosing to be effective in that two-day window, when a patient starts to show symptoms of exposure to the avian flu virus?
3-To my knowledge, Tamiflu has been used as an influenza remedy, not as a preventative. Maybe Tamiflu needs to be given prophylactically--and continually, for the entire "threat period"--in order to be effective against avian flu? If that is the case, then how many billions of doses would be required to keep the U.S. population protected? It boggles the mind to contemplate this possibility!
The point of this post is that we should not, perhaps, place our faith in Tamiflu as a partial solution to the avian flu threat. What we do know with certainty is that Tamiflu is very expensive. --And it is in somewhat-short supply. And, for all of that, it may not even be effective.
