Scientists still don't know if two commonly used flu drugs — Roche's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza — really work in seasonal or pandemic flu outbreaks and say robust clinical trials are urgently needed to find out.
While such medicines are stockpiled by governments around the world and were widely used in the 2009/2010 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic, no randomized trials were conducted then, so evidence is scant on how effective that approach was.
Publishing a report on the use of such antiviral drugs — known as neuraminidase inhibitors — against flu, experts co-led by Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar said this had been a huge wasted opportunity and one that should not happen again.