Over on foreignpolicy.com they’re reporting the Top Ten non-News Stories of 2006. Among their picks is the non-story of bird flu, or avian influenza as it’s more correctly known. In case you missed it, we didn’t all die of bird flu again this year. However, there were a few people who, having got so scared of the tiny risk that they might catch the H5N1 strain of the disease began taking Tamiflu prophalactically. More fool them, it turned out. Here’s what the site had to say:
“In November, the Canadian health ministry issued a warning on Tamiflu after 10 Canadians taking the drug had died suspiciously. And the US Food and Drug Administration received more than 100 reports of injury and delirium among Tamiflu takers for a 10-month period in 2005 and 2006. That’s nearly as many cases as were logged over the drug’s five-year trial period. For now, the cure seems worse than the disease.”
Highly ironic that a drug taken for its protective effects against a disease that doesn’t really yet exist should have claimed so many victims. Unless we see a sudden spate of bird flu infections in the developed world, 2006 will remain another year in which none of the scaremongerees actually died of bird flu.