The British government has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on stockpiling ineffective medicine for emergency treatment of flu, a study shows.Orwellian UK BANNED Press TV: Oxford University conducted the study and published the results on Thursday.
The UK Department of Health spent USD 711 million (£424 million) on Tamiflu medicine and another USD 228 million (£136 million) on Relenza medicine for a flue pandemic between 2006 and 2013, the study said.
Researchers from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Cochrane Collaboration, a group of independent scientists, said the medicines offered only a small benefit to flu victims with no evidence that they reduced the risk of hospitalization or death.
The scientists also found worrying side effects in people taking the medicines to prevent flue, including psychiatric and kidney problems.
“There appears to be no evidence for patients, clinicians or policy makers to use these drugs to prevent serious outcomes, both in annual influenza and pandemic influenza outbreaks,” the study said.Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ, said that although the decision to stockpile the medicines was politically understandable at the time, “When one thinks of what half a billion pounds could have been spent on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), let alone around the world, one has to be pretty scathing about that decision.”
In November last year, Care Quality Commission (CQC) warned that NHS hospitals had failed to improve the quality of patient care in the three years since the 2009 Mid Staffordshire scandal.
The scandal at Stafford Hospital, a small district general hospital in Staffordshire, emerged in 2009, when it was revealed that between 400 to 1,200 patients died as a result of poor care from January 2005 to March 2009.
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UK Wastes $1 Billion On Tamiflu, Other Ineffective Drugs On WHO Recomendations
RT: The British government wasted $896 million dollars on buying two ant-flu drugs, despite their not being proven to prevent infections spreading or stop serious illness, according to scientists who spent four years studying and analyzing the medications.
Parliament's influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said it was "surprised and concerned" to discover that information on methods and results of clinical trials of such prescribed drugs "is routinely withheld," and said there was a "lack of consensus over how well Tamiflu ... actually works."
The government spent $712 million stockpiling Tamiflu and $228 million on Relenza as a precaution in the event of a flu pandemic. The UK took steps to buy enormous quantities of the medicines following a recommendation by the World Health Organization (WHO) in light of the 2009 outbreak of swine flu, which led to 14 deaths in Northern Ireland. Almost $3 billion was spent on the drug worldwide at the height of the pandemic.
"The case for stockpiling antiviral medicines at the current level is based on judgment rather than on evidence of their effectiveness during an influenza pandemic," said Richard Bacon, a leading member of the committee.
However, a report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by Cochrane Collaboration, which is a group of independent scientists who investigate how effective medicines are, brings into question just how useful Tamiflu - also known as Oseltamivir - is. Despite the vast amount of money spent, the drug does not significantly reduce the amount of time needed to fight a bout of flu. Without the medication, the time is seven days, while those taking Tamiflu felt better in 6.3 days.
The journal mentions there are some worrying side-effects from those who use the medication to tackle flu. Tamiflu, produced by Swiss company Roche, can cause psychiatric and kidney problems, while it is also linked to increased risk of headaches and vomiting. Despite only fractionally reducing the time it takes to be cured and the costs involved in stockpiling the drug, the BMJ wonders why the medicine is included on the WHO list of essential drugs.
Tom Jefferson, a researcher for Cochrane Collaboration, independent scientists who investigate how effective medicines are, wrote a series of emails to the WHO in March 2013 asking that Oseltamivir be deleted from the list, saying in one letter, “is the WHO willing to keep a drug on the essential medicines list if its only benefit is symptom reduction, similar to what we might expect in a drug like aspirin”?
The WHO never responded to Jefferson’s request, for the drug’s removal from the list.
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