Swine of a Flu

Since March 2009, we have been exposed to our daily doses of swine flu virus and the impending dooms day. Word smiths of the media ensure that the words 'swine flu' are always preceded either by 'deadly' or 'dangerous' and are succeeded by 'epidemic' or 'pandemic'. But the occurrence of some contagious bio disease seems to have reached predictable seasonal regularity of Hindu Brahmin or Jewish festivals, though the festivals are joyful celebrations with food and prayer.

The net is riddled with fragmented pockets of reliable as well as fraudulent information. Search engines do a poor job in getting at the gist of the average user's intention in finding something on the net. I am not squealing about locating restaurants , ticketing or porn. Yahoo has gone a step further and introduced it's notion of 'ideological search', where one gets to see an un spammed search content. Much like the Truman Show!

Other than standard precautions such as eating healthy regular food, personal hygiene and building up resistance thru exercise and natural food supplements one can do precious little. The sale of Tamilflu medicine has skyrocketed!! While WHO and Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and US Food and Drug Org say Tamilflu should be administered for five days, UK researchers don't agree. UK government issued a directive stating not to take Tamiflu as a preventive due to it's side effects.

The business side of Tamiflu is certainly a cause for smile for the companies involved ( quite sad though that it has come to such a pass) and it's stake holders. The medicine Tamiflu is marketed by the Swiss multinational company Hoffmann-La Roche Holding. Roche in turn has been licensed the use of this patented in the US drug, by the US company Gilead Sciences. Roche sells Tamiflu (Oseltamivir Phosphate) at US$23.80. Roche's patent application to sell exclusively in India has been rejected , and rightly so, by the Indian government, but Roche has licensed the sale to a Hyderabad based company Hetero Drugs. The Indian company Cipla has developed a generic version, though derisively called copy cat version by some, called AntiFlu that is sold at US $ 10.70. Cipla will supply it's medicine to Mexico, and Latin American countries. Cipla says it's not against patenting but against Monopoly.

Indian government has been acting quite wisely, by not allowing Tamilflu to be sold at street corners unlike the over the counter i-pill and Unwanted 72 contraceptive tablets which have found democratic use amidst, primary and high school girls and grown up singles and multiples.

Both Roche and Cipla registered a strong and healthy quarter on quarter growth, spurred naturally by a healthy spread of swine flu scare.

Let us hope and pray the scare and the flu subside. For those who would like to reboot their knowledge on this piggy back flu , check out the following:


http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/is-swine-flu-more-dangerous-than-other-types-of-influenza/