By Daily Mail Reporter
Health officials are to face questions about whether they prescribed Tamiflu on a mass scale too quickly in the wake of the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
A two-year review into the widely prescribed drug will reveal findings about the effectiveness and side-effects of the swine flu ‘wonder-drug’.
The conclusions made by the Cochrane Collaboration could pose uncomfortable questions for the Department of Health as to whether they rushed into mass prescriptions of Tamiflu when swine flu hit the nation in 2009.
Reports at the time of the swine flu outbreak in Britain listed a number of side effects associated with the antiviral, such as nausea, nightmares in children, and other reactions.
As well as questioning issues surrounding Tamiflu, researchers behind the review also claimed the makers of the drug refused to hand over raw data to help them with their appraisal.
Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche claimed Tamiflu reduced the number of patients who needed to be hospitalised after becoming infected with swine flu.
The comprehensive appraisal by Cochrane, a non-profit group who analyse medical evidence through results from the world’s best medical research studies, aims to challenge Roche’s claim when its findings are released tomorrow.
The Cochrane Collaboration, considered by experts to be the ‘gold standard’ of medical evidence, also reported problems obtaining data from Roche back in 2009.
Professor Sir Iain Chalmers, a founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: ‘We have invested millions of pounds on stockpiling Tamiflu on the basis of a paper that presented the results of 12 trials, only two of which have been published.
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