Testing It Up

There have been cases of swine flu being resistant to Tamiflu, which indicated that the virus may be mutating. This has warranted investigations and is undeniably fueling concerns among people.

Despite this, though, health experts in Europe and North America reportedly gave the assurance that swine flu vaccines in their current form are still effective towards protecting one’s self against swine flu.

According to experts, which included Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, the fact that the H1N1 virus mutated did not come as a surprise. On the contrary, it was a phenomenon that they had already foreseen and expected. Neither will this be the only time that the virus will mutate, the experts also said.

Schuchat also said that the discovery of the mutation does not have an impact on the effectiveness of the vaccine against swine flu, as well as anti-virals.

The World Health Organization stressed that while a mutation of the virus has been discovered, it “did not appear to cause a more contagious or more dangerous form” of the swine flu virus.

Mutation is not new, as similar cases of mutations have already been observed in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, Ukraine and the United States as far back as April this year, when the virus and the flu first came to media and global attention.

Didier Houssin, France’s health chief, also confirmed through a radio interview that “the ability of the vaccine to induce an immune reaction is not affected by the mutation,” which indicates that the vaccines will still be effective. There are also vaccines that have been manufactured with the possibility of mutations already taken into consideration; there are vaccines that have additives that “expands the range of effectiveness” of the vaccine in terms of being able to react against a slightly modified virus.

That does not mean, though, that scientists and researchers are resting on their laurels. They are still very much concerned about the possibility that a mutation into a more virulent form of the virus will occur, and studies are being conducted to prepare for that possibility.

It seems like the swine flu saga may be far from over, as cases have been cropping up around the world of swine flu strains that seem to be resistant to the drugs that are currently being administered to fight it.

In the state of North Carolina, four such cases have been confirmed at the Duke University Medical Center. The virus seems to be resistant to Tamiflu, one of the drugs used to treat severe cases of swine flu.

Across the Atlantic in London, British health officials are also currently investigating how a drug-resistant strain of swine flu is spreading from person to person. Five such cases of patients who are infected with a virus that is resistant to Tamiflu have been confirmed in Wales, as reported by the Health Protection Agency in the UK.

There were also four other patients who were infected with H1N1 in the UK that had the same genetic mutation, although one of them was helped with Tamiflu while the rest seem to have responded to the other medication used to treat swine flu – Relenza.

What the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are looking into now is the fact that these occurrences may be an indication that the H1N1 virus is mutating. The CDC has since launched an investigation into these findings.

The four cases identified at the Duke University Medical Center reportedly involve patients who were very ill at the onset. The patients reportedly may have caught the virus in a cancer unit and three of them have already died.

The British Health Protection Agency reportedly said in a statement, however, that at present they “believe that the risk to the general healthy population is low.”

Another investigation is also being done, this time by the World Health Organization, in Norway. There are reportedly variant swine flu cases there that have been linked to two deaths and one severe case in the country.