Flu drug stockpiles save lives, too costly for many

Stockpiling antiviral flu drugs and vaccines saves lives and reduces disease in a flu pandemic, but is too expensive for around two thirds of the world’s population, scientists said on Wednesday.

Researchers from Singapore found that stockpiling flu drugs such as Roche’s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza “significantly reduced” death rates, but said many nations cannot afford to build up stockpiles at current prices.

“The main difficulty is the cost, not just of the drugs themselves but of maintaining the stockpile and then deploying it,” said Alex Cook of the National University of Singapore, who worked on the study.

Cook and his team built an “epidemic-economic model” to analyze total death rates and costs of antiviral stockpiling for Brazil, China, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Zimbabwe.

They based the model on experiences of previous flu pandemics in 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009, and factored in expectations of death rates, disease, direct costs like medical bills and hospital time, as well as indirect costs such the cost of large numbers of people being off sick from work.

They found that while stockpiling drugs would save lives in all countries, its economics varied greatly, with only the wealthiest countries likely to find it cost-effective.

The researchers, whose work was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, looked at a wide range of potential stockpile sizes, and found that to ensure the best protection, flu drug stockpiles would need to cover around 25 percent of the population.

These results were in sharp contrast with stockpile levels during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, the researchers said, which ranged from 1 percent of China’s population, through 30 percent in the United States, to 80 percent in Britain.

“Our findings can ... be used to prepare for future pandemics without over stockpiling costly antivirals or cutting the supply of other countries,” said Luis Carrasco, also of the National University of Singapore, who led the study.

The researchers noted that cheaper, generic antivirals could make stockpiling cost effective for countries with large populations, like China, India and Indonesia.

But even if generics were available, Zimbabwe and similarly poor countries would still not be able to afford to stockpile without impacting spending on other areas of health, they said.

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(Reuters)