Aug 22
Questions are arising over how long the Tamiflu retro-viral drugs being stockpiled by the New Zealand government — and many other countries — will remain an effective weapon against the next flu pandemic.
Tamiflu-resistant forms of the “ordinary” seasonal influenza are rapidly spreading and the drug may be ineffective in fighting the dominant flu strain in South Africa this winter.
World Health Organisation (WHO) data shows tests on 107 people in South Africa with the H1N1 strain — one of the three most common flu viruses in humans — found all had a mutant bug resistant to Tamiflu, the WHO said in a statement. Only one of the patients was taking Tamiflu at the time of sampling.
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Tags: bird flu, H5N1, influenza, New Zealand, resistant, South Africa, Tamiflu, Vaccination, Vaccine, virus, WHO
Apr 09
Doctors have warned that if a superbug which is known to be even more resistant to antibiotics than clostridium difficile and MRSA takes hold in hospitals, the country could face a pandemic.
The acinetobacter bug is being treated with older antibiotics because newer ones do not work. There are fears that injured soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have passed the infection on in civilian hospitals.
Prof Matthew Falagas, an expert in hospital-acquired infections, said: “In some cases, we have simply run out of treatments and we could be facing a pandemic with public health implications.”
He warned delegates at the Society for General Microbiology conference in Edinburgh: “Doctors in many countries have gone back to using old antibiotics that were abandoned 20 years ago because their toxic side-effects were so frequent and so bad. Continue reading »
Tags: Afghanistan, antibiotics, blood poisoning, bug, Colistin, fear, Health Protection Agency, hospitals, HPA, infections, Iraq, Matthew Falagas, Microbiology, pandemic, pneumonia, resistant, superbug
