Experts’ Warning Over Use of Drugs

ATTEMPTS to control the deadly bird flu could be helping to create a drug resistant form of the virus, new research suggested last night.

Scientists identified a strain of the H5N1 virus in Vietnam resistant to Tamiflu, the drug being stockpiled to fight any outbreak in the UK.

It was found in a Vietnamese girl who was put on a course of preventative treatment with Tamiflu for four days in February.

Medics fear she may be one of the first H5N1 victims to acquire the virus through person-to-person transmission The British government does not plan to offer Tamiflu, one of a class of drugs called neuraminidase inhibitors, to healthy people as a precaution.

But prophylactic (taken as a preventative measure) use of Tamiflu was part of the control measures being adopted in Asian hotspots where about 60 people died from the virus.

The new findings, due to be published in the journal Nature next week, suggest it may be contributing to the emergence of drug resistance.

Viruses and bacteria can become resistant if the treatment used against them was too weak.

Up to now the virus has only been known to pass from birds to humans. At least one other case of transmission between humans has been suspected, but not confirmed.

Health experts fear that if the virus mutates into a form that transmits easily between people it could trigger a global pandemic claiming millions of lives.

A team led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, from the University of Tokyo in Japan, looked at 10 viral clones from the girl and found six were highly resistant to Tamiflu.

Three others were slightly resistant and one was “highly sensitive”.

However even the highly resistant virus did succumb to another drug, zanamivir – marketed as Relenza – which has been suggested as an alternative bird flu treatment but so far not been widely adopted.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said there were no current plans to administer it prophylactically either to members of the public or health workers