British Medical Journal editorial includes:
Their challenge is to keep bird flu forever in the public eye. This should be getting harder, as influenza H5N1 is proving particularly resistant to undergoing the killer mutation that would allow efficient human to human transmission of the virus. Ten years after the strain first appeared in humans, it has killed just 191 people. This is despite the most propitious of circumstances: millions of people and poultry living in very close proximity in South East Asia. Although these deaths are a tragedy for the victims and their families, it’s as well to remember that a similar number of people die on the roads world wide every 84 minutes.
Traditionally, we’ve blamed the drug companies for talking up the risks of diseases, or even inventing diseases, but this is not the case with bird flu. The track record of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) as a treatment for H5N1 is decidedly mixed, and its use in seasonal flu has been linked to suicides and neuropsychiatric symptoms in Japanese teenagers. FAF has incorporated this pharmaceutical failure into its story for bird flu: The Drugs Don’t Work. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
FAF knows that the best way to generate column inches is high profile scientific conferences with well oiled media machines, and in this week’s BMJ Richard Smith, our previous editor, reports on a session he chaired at a conference of Health Technology Assessment International (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39255.606713.DB). Some of the observations were familiar: the inevitability of the pandemic and the possibility of drug resistance. But others were relatively new: the terminological mutation from “avian flu” to “pandemic flu,” in recognition of H5N1’s failure to mutate genetically.