Facing Down Pandemic Flu, the World's Defenses Are Weak: A lack of interest in developing pandemic flu vaccines and a dearth of antiviral drugs have left the world vulnerable to a global outbreak

摘要

At a hotel meeting room outside Quebec last March, 35 health officials and others from the world's seven leading industrialized countries and Mexico passed around a vial of bitter-tasting white power. If Asia's potent H5N1 bird flu assumes a form transmitted between humans, this drug, oseltamivir, would be the world's only initial defense against a pandemic that could kill millions of people. But oseltamivir, sold as Tamiflu, is made by only one company, Roche, at a single plant in Switzerland. "We are living in a brave new world where we only have one drug," says flu expert Arnold Monto of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who spoke before the working group meeting of the G7+ Global Health Security Action Group.