Tamiflu Helpless Against Most U.S. Flu Infections This Season

[Purveyor]

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Tamiflu, the Roche Holding AG drug for influenza, can’t fight most infections that have been diagnosed in the U.S. flu season so far, health experts said.

More than half of the flu viruses that have been analyzed in the U.S. this season are of the H1N1 strain, said Joseph Bresee, chief of influenza epidemiology and prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Virtually all the H1N1 viruses the agency has tested, 72 of 73, are Tamiflu-resistant, he said.

The emergence of Tamiflu-resistant strains that can spread easily from one person to another makes it more difficult for doctors to use drugs to treat people who are at high risk of severe flu complications, such as pneumonia, he said.

“We don’t have that many antivirals available to us and in certain populations that can be very important,” Bresee said today in a telephone interview. “There’s got to be additional antiviral medicines put in our toolkits so if resistance develops against one, we’ll have others to use.”

All the other flu strains tested by CDC, called H3N2 and B flu viruses, were susceptible to Tamiflu treatment, said Terence Hurley, a Roche spokesman. “Tamiflu is a good drug, and we’ll continue to monitor the situation,” he said today in a telephone interview.

Multiple flu strains spread around the globe each year, usually originating in Asia and moving from there to Africa, Europe and North and South America. The World Health Organization said Jan. 6 that Tamiflu, the top-selling flu drug in the world, was unlikely to stop H1N1 viruses spreading in North American and Europe this year.

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