Tamiflu Use Leading to Drug Resistant Virus

The flu sucks.

We all want to do everything possible to shorten it’s duration or better yet avoid it all together.

Yet – virus’ are clever little buggers and are mutating to become immune to our biggest tool – Tamiflu.

“Something happened in 2008, when drug resistance took hold,” said Daniel Janies, associate professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State and primary author of the study. “The drug-resistant isolates became the ones that survived all over the world. This is just static now. The seasonal H1N1 influenza virus is fixed at resistant.”

A normal flu will come on suddenly – unlike a cold that will gradually make itself known – symptoms will typically last up to 3 weeks. A fever will often occur for 3-4 days.

Unless we are in a high risk group… we don’t want to be treating the flu with drugs that are causing these virus’ to mutate. Doing this puts us all at greater risk.

Natural remedies like Black Elderberry have been shown in studies to shorten flu duration.

“It is a pretty good bet that whatever pressure is in the environment, excessive use of Tamiflu or something else, that was driving seasonal influenza to become resistant to Tamiflu is also going to apply to pandemic influenza,” Janies said. “We can see it happening already.

The moral of the story seems to be – once again – use caution before taking drugs. If we don’t all collectively do this – we’ll find ourselves without the tools to fight these virus’ when we really need them.

 

While we’re on the subject of virus’ mutating it’s a good time to remind our readers that antibacterial products have been shown to be of concern for a similar reason – bacterial resistance according to the AMA.

Our best defense against cold and flu is frequent hand washing with REGULAR soap and water (not antibacterial).

Read up on the tips and tricks we use to fight cold & flu in the Diva home.

The Bottom Line is that we are putting ourselves at risk using antibiotics and other drugs when a cold or flu is inconvenient rather than saving these drugs for true medical emergencies.

Pandemic Flu, Like Seasonal H1N1, Shows Signs of Resisting Tamiflu.