Blackmoor Vituperative

The government, for the first time, is urging doctors not to prescribe two antiviral drugs commonly used to fight influenza because of concerns about drug resistance, officials announced Saturday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the recommendation covers the drugs rimantadine and amantadine for the 2006 flu season.

Results of recent lab tests on influenza samples showed that the predominant strain this season – the H3N2 influenza strain – was resistant to the drugs, the agency said.

“Clinicians should not use rimantadine and amantadine … because the drugs will not be effective,” said CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding. The two drugs have been used for years to combat type-A influenza.

Gerberding said the lab data, which CDC scientists had been analyzing since Friday, surprised health officials and the health agency rushed to get the word out Saturday.

“I don’t think we were expecting it to be so dramatic so quickly this year,” Gerberding said. “We just didn’t feel it was responsible to wait three more days during a holiday weekend to let clinicians know.”

The CDC tested 120 influenza A virus samples from the H3N2 strain and found that 91 percent, or 109, were resistant to the two drugs. Two years ago, less than 2 percent of the samples were resistant. Last year, 11 percent were, the CDC said.

Gerberding said the agency was not sure how the resistance occurred, saying it may have been the result of a mutation in the H3N2 flu strain or could have come from overuse of the drugs abroad, such as in countries that permit them drugs to be purchased without a prescription.

One flu expert, Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, said the development was “disconcerting” as flu now has joined the ranks of other diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV, that recently have acquired the ability to resist front-line medications.

(from The Mercury News, CDC: Flu virus resistant to two drugs)

The news isn’t all bad. The two drugs mentioned have largely been replaced by Tamiflu and Relenza. Even so, the flu already kills around 36,000 Americans per year. That may seem like a lot, particularly when one considers that merely 3,000 (approximately) people were killed in the terrorist attacks which took place on 2001-09-11. I have to wonder just how quickly the Constitution would have been shredded had 36,000 people been killed on that day — and yet, where is the outrage, where are the impassioned speeches, for the 36,000 Americans killed every year by the flu? And people say I’m cynical when I tell them that the expansions of government power since that day have nothing to do with protecting Americans, and everything to do with controlling them.

Just to give you a few more numbers to put things into perspective (and because I find statistics fascinating), there are 700,000 physicians in the U.S.A., and there are roughly 120,000 accidental deaths caused by physicians per year. Accidental death percentage per physician = 0.171. Meanwhile, there are 80 million firearm owners in the U.S.A., and there are 1,500 accidental gun deaths per year. The percentage of accidental deaths per gun owner = 0.0000188. Statistically, doctors are 9,000 times more dangerous to the public health than gun owners. 🙂

These are just numbers. Don’t get too worked up about it. Statistically, it’s unlikely that any of those numbers was someone you knew.