Apples for Health- Report: Focus flu drugs on young, not old

Report: Focus flu drugs on young, not old

TRENTO, Italy, July 27 (UPI) -- Vaccinating elderly people against H1N1 swine flu will do little to prevent deaths, so the vaccines should be reserved for children, Italian researchers said.
"Although a policy of age-specific prioritization of anti-viral use will be controversial ethically, it may be the most efficient use of stockpiled therapies," Stefano Merler of the Italian research organization Bruno Kessler Foundation said in a statement.
"This is of particular importance for countries where the amount of drug stockpiled is well below the (World Health Organization's) suggested level (of 25 percent of the population)," he said.
Italy, for instance, has only enough drugs to treat 12 percent of its population, he said.
The elderly, while most vulnerable to flu, are also least affected by the vaccine, researchers find.
And while some policies call for using anti-viral drugs as prophylactic agents in nursing homes, where viruses can sweep through and kill many frail residents, the strategy may not lead to any significant reduction in the number of deaths in a pandemic, when the drugs are in high demand, the researchers said.
The researchers based their conclusions on the last three flu pandemics, in 1918, 1957 and 1968. In 1918, the virus affected more young adults and older children than usual -- just as has been seen with the H1N1 pandemic.
Having stockpiles of drugs also does little good if people don't get them within 24 to 48 hours of contracting the virus, Merler and his colleagues reported in the BioMed Central journal BMC Infectious Diseases.