Tag Archives: contagion

Health, News, Science

Why a Drug-Resistant Flu is Coming for You

The SunBreak’s Audrey has already made the link between Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion and the flu, and because news about the end of humanity is more relevant if it’s piggybacked on a recent film, we’re going to let the researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center make the Contagion analogy yet again:

In the new movie Contagion, fictional health experts scramble to get ahead of a flu-like pandemic as a drug-resistant virus quickly spreads, killing millions of people within days after they contract the illness.

Although the film isn’t based entirely on reality, it’s not exactly science fiction, either.

(Okay, third time: This Thursday, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., film-talking-guy Warren Etheredge discusses Contagion with Seattle infectious disease experts Ann Marie Kimball, MD, MPH, author of Risky Trade: Infectious Disease in the Era of Global Trade and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington; and David Sherman, PhD, a tuberculosis researcher at Seattle Biomed and adjunct associate professor at the UW School of Global Health. The panel will be held at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, 307 Westlake Avenue North, Suite 500.)

Dennis Chao, FHCRC researcher

Researchers Dennis Chao, Jesse D. Bloom, Beth F. Kochin, Rustom Antia, and Ira M. Longini, Jr., have published a paper on drug-resistant flu in the Royal Society journal Interface that illuminates–horrifically, if you’re inclined to see things this way–how quickly the flu has become resistant to Tamiflu, even though it shouldn’t have, given the “low overall level of the oseltamivir [i.e., Tamiflu] usage.”

We were not around for the 1918 flu epidemic, but we’re still very impressed by it, and regular readers of The SunBreak know that we like to keep close tabs on the efficacy of flu vaccines and antiviral treatments.

Luckily, we have the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center nearby, where Chao, Bloom, and Longini put in time (when the last is not busy with being professor of biostatistics in the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions and the UF College of Medicine and the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute).

The team studied the rise in resistance to Tamiflu between 2006 and 2009 (2009 was a banner year for flu locally), discovering that their computer models for the rise of resistance would not conform with observations unless the virus was doing something surprising:

The extreme speed with which the resistance spread in seasonal H1N1 suggests that the resistant strain had a transmission advantage in untreated hosts, and this could have arisen from genetic hitchhiking, or from the mutations responsible for resistance and compensation.

In slightly plainer English, it may come down to a single person with a doubly-mutant flu bug–one that is both Tamiflu-resistant and more contagious than usual.

Ira Longini

The models predict that it’s not a question of the larger Tamiflu-using population selecting for resistance, but of a Tamiflu-resistant mutant virus getting better, faster, stronger on its own. “If you see resistant strains in parts of the world where no one is taking antiviral drugs, that’s the smoking gun that the resistant strain must be transmitting,” Longini explains.

The hypothesis is that Tamiflu resistance somehow “hitchhiked” via other mutations for contagiousness. This mutant synergy is disturbing, given a) how big a problem drug resistance is already and b) that Tamiflu is stockpiled worldwide. As of the end of 2010, WHO had found about one-third of the flu strains it tested were resistant to Tamiflu (though to be fair, there are already concerns about how well Tamiflu works, under the best conditions).

All of which makes this a good year to get a flu shot. It can be wildly variable in effectiveness, depending on how well the mix of strains vaccinated against match up with what appears “in the wild,” but if you’ve ever bought a lottery ticket, you have no excuse for not taking these odds.

Film & TV, Health

Contagion Could Happen Every Flu Season

2 Comments

OMG, we all saw Contagion this weekend, yes? I could watch Gwyneth Paltrow die all day, every day. God bless Steven Soderbergh.

Contagion is my kind of taut and un-dumbed-down thriller. Because massive die-offs from a disease epidemic are much more likely (and perhaps warranted) than a zombie apocalypse. We are waaaaaaay overdue for a plague of some sort—making it a whole century with only one really nasty global flu pandemic is unheard of. That shit is real.

And even if things don’t get Contagion bad (just yet), Americans get sick in the millions every cold and flu season. And that’s a problem.

Case in point:

As the new blockbuster film Contagion, a thriller about a global pandemic, finishes its first weekend at the box office, activists from across the country are releasing an online video called Contagion: Not Just a Movie. The web film, produced by Family Values @ Work, shows the stories of five American workers [including Tasha, a Seattle-area Safeway cashier] who have been forced to go into work when they are sick because they weren’t allowed to take off or couldn’t afford going without pay…. These workers are some of the 44 million Americans without paid sick days who risk their families’ financial security or their jobs if they stay home when they are ill.

Everybody knows that if you’re sick, it is in everyone’s best interest that you stay home and reduce the risk of infecting others. Too bad then that in this economy, taking unpaid time off is not a viable option for many, even when they are severely sick. Here’s a little factoid from the IWPR to give you pause: “Three in four food service workers, three in five personal health care workers, and three in four child care workers, all of whom have significant interaction with others, do not have paid sick days.” Yowza. That’s not a good idea, for all of society. Simply put, a paid sick days policy is the reasonable and prudent thing to do.

Closer to home, the local branch of FV@W, Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce has been lobbying for sick days, and just yesterday afternoon, the Seattle City Council passed a paid sick days bill. (We already noted that Dick Conlin was the only member of the Council to vote no.)

The Philadelphia City Council is expected to vote on another bill later this week, which is also expected to pass. Those hippies in San Francisco, DC, and Milwaukee already have laws on the books, and many more municipalities (among them Connecticut, Denver, Massachusetts, New York City, and Georgia) should have bills on the docket for votes this fall.