Good News For Tamiflu Resistance

The drug company Roche will be pleased with these results...

One of the biggest concerns regarding any antiviral medication is that in time it will develop resistance to the particular virus and thus the medication will not work anymore. This is especially worrying for wide scale viral pandemics like the H5N1 bird flu virus and some experts predict that the Tamiflu drug made by the pharmaceutical company Roche will in time become completely ineffective against this virus.

However new information published by the World Health Organisation shows that there is a very low frequency of resistance to the bird flu drug Tamiflu over the years 2003 to 2006 and this they said is very good news. What it means is that over the last three years the H5N1 bird flu virus has not mutated or changed much so that it can adapt to negate the effects of the active ingredient of Tamiflu, oseltamivir.

The research was done in collaboration with many different countries and was actively supported by the World Health Organisation as well Roche and it was seen that there was only a resistance of 0.3 percent to Tamiflu during the last three influenza seasons. Much of the research was done in Japan where Tamiflu is widely used for regular flu and over 35 million people have used it. Another flu drug for example amantadine 2 has seen rates of resistance of up to 65 percent in Japan showing that Tamiflu is far more effective.

The drug company Roche will be pleased with these results but they said that they are by no means getting complacent and will always be monitoring the resistance of Tamiflu to all flu viruses. It is likely that when a full scale bird flu pandemic breaks out Tamiflu will be in the forefront of the fight to beat it and it is essential that it remains resistant to the H5N1 virus.