Reading the newspaper during the “quiet days”, I find out that the swine infection virus now starts developing a resistance against Tamiflu (SZ). And therefore the vaccination is said to be more effective than the medicine.
These are the kinds of reports that annoy me.
I find it most questionable to compare apples with pears in a single sentence. Medicine is supposed to help or make the suffering less acute after you have contracted an illness, whereas a vaccination is supposed to protect against the infection. Seen under this light, Tamiflu and the vaccine are ”two pairs of shoes” and I presume that the article aims at saying something totally different from what you can read in it.
But the entire topic is not my idea of a good joke.
Tamiflu is probably a very efficient medicine. It causes quite a bit of uproar in the human body and also has an impressive number of side-effects. They make your body weaker. But they may well support the placebo effect as the patient feels that the agent obviously does have some effect on the body.
Whether or not Tamiflu actually helps against infection has been doubtful even when it first appeared on the market. Now it is said that a virus has developed a resistance against some medicine that most likely never was any help, anyway. Isn’t that a nice story?
But it must be expected that the placebo effect, too, will now be reduced. After all, now we know the virus to be resistant…
If nothing else, Tamiflu saved the “fiscal year” 2007 for Roche. Even for the director of Roche, this was quite a surprise. I heard him say so myself.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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