Tamiflu

We have yet another tragic flu story in the news. This time it's a 38-year old mother who died because she thought the flu drug she was prescribed was too expensive. The only problem? The media got everything wrong. The flu drug would not have made any difference. 

There have been some remarkable advances in medicine over the past two decades. HIV infection is no longer a death sentence. Hepatitis C is now readily curable. There is now a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer one of only two cancer vaccines in existence. Targeted approaches to cancer, as well as the use of genetic information for personalizing therapies for individual patients have the potential to completely change the way that cancer and maybe other diseases are treated. But, science is unpredictable. There are still diseases that simply won t yield, despite the huge amount of research that is thrown at them. Influenza is one of them.

We were somewhat surprised to see today s recommendation by the CDC, which urged doctors to treat flu more aggressively. If only it were that simple. This advisory is a result of a bad flu season, coupled with a poor match of this year s vaccine with circulating influenza strains. The match is so poor that the CDC estimates that only about one-third of predominant strains are covered far worse than last year s vaccine, which was criticized for covering roughly 60 percent of strains.