What is Tamiflu and How Does it Work?

We got any biologists, doctors, or public health experts here?

There's all this talk in the news lately about preparing for the next global flu pandemic and the drug Tamiflu keeps coming up as a possible treatment for a widespread flu outbreak. What is Tamiflu and what does it do? Anyone know?

Tamiflu is a serum from Southern California, taken from the blood of small blond white girls who are not to tall - Gidgets (Girls+Midgets) The first donor being Tammy Whynot

This post has been edited by pdbdakine on Oct 19 2005, 08:28 AM

Silly Paul!

There was a very interesting discussion yesterday about Tamiflu on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. The segment featured:

Richard Knox (NPR Science Correspondent)
Dr. Andrew Pavia (Chief of Pediatric Infectious Disease, Univ. of Utah)
Kathy Kinlaw (Director, Center for Ethics, Emory Univ.)
Arthur Caplan (Bioethicist, Univ. of Pennsylvania)

They explain what Tamiflu is, how it works, and what steps the US government might take to ration the drug in the event of a flu pandemic.

You can listen to the segment by going to this web page and clicking on the red "listen" button:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4964035