Most of the cases involve teenagers who were Japanese...

There is much controversy in Tokyo concerning the drug Tamiflu at present and in a very unusual step the Japanese health authorities have advised doctors that they should not prescribe the flu drug to teenagers or young people unless it is a serious emergency. The Japanese health authorities admitted that they had no clear evidence that Tamiflu drug could actually cause dangerous or erratic behaviour in teenagers but following on from a few reports they decided that they should issued the warning just to be safe.

The Japanese public were particularly concerned after a report said that 2 twelve year old boys had jumped out of the windows of their houses and broken their legs after having taken the Tamiflu drug. In America and the Food & Drug Administration has said that it has got over 100 reports of teenagers hallucinating and behaving very strangely after having used the flu drug Tamiflu. What is even stranger still is that most of the cases involve teenagers who were Japanese and so this problem seems to be confined to patients who have a Japanese ancestry. The manufacturer of the Tamiflu influenza drugs namely Roche says that there was no clear clinical evidence to show that Tamiflu could cause hallucinations or strange behavior and said that it was not clear why the Japanese authorities had taken this step.

The Japanese health ministry however has issued a statement claiming that they are going to look very carefully into the reports of abnormal behaviour and conduct proper clinical trials with the Tamiflu drug for the benefit of the public. They reckon that they have to do this quickly because should a major bird flu pandemic hit Japan they want to know as much about this drug as possible especially as it is known to be the most effective medicine to beat human cases of the H5N1 virus.