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Robert G. Webster is regarded as the father of influenza virology, having correctly posited more than 4 decades ago that human flu's are derived from bird flu's.
Webster holds the Rose Marie Thomas Chair in Virology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and is also a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society of New Zealand, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
So when Webster speaks, people listen.
About a week ago he was interviewed by Reuters on the need for new antiviral treatments (see Webster: Better Drugs Needed To Fight A Pandemic).
Today Trine Tsouderos, staff writer for the Chicago Tribune, conducted another interview with Dr. Webster.
Flu expert says doctors are misusing antiviral drugs
By Trine Tsouderos | Tribune staff reporter
- 5:35 PM CST, March 6, 2009
Flu news is going around. Just this week, scientists detailed how one of our go-to flu drugs, Tamiflu, no longer works against this year's most common strain, while other researchers announced exciting new advances in the development of influenza vaccines.
With flu on the brain, we called one of the world's leading experts on the topic, Robert Webster, chair of infectious diseases at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Among other achievements, Webster helped discover wild birds are "reservoirs" for the influenza virus.
In the interview, Webster railed against the way antiviral medications are being used and warned that we would burn through our available medicines if we weren't careful. Here's more of what he had to say:
On why we shouldn't use just one drug -- Relenza -- to replace Tamiflu when treating this particular strain of flu, as the Centers for Disease Control recommends:
"The future for antivirals for the flu is the use of combination therapy. Nature is teaching us a lesson here. We should have learned from HIV that if you use mono-therapy drugs, you are asking for trouble. It is a stats game. If you use one drug, you will get resistance. But if you use two, it squares your chances. And with three, the chance of resistance goes down, and if you have four, you have a combination that goes on for years and years. With flu, we don't have that luxury, but we can use them in combination already. And we are not doing so."
Follow the link to read the rest of the interview, where Dr. Webster addresses two other questions:
On why Relenza is just going to end up like Tamiflu, losing its effectiveness:
On what lesson we should learn from Tamiflu resistance:
A hat tip to Florida1 at Flutrackers for alerting me to this interview.
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