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Urge: Naked World
Embarrassed Italy boots 350 Nigerian prostitutes
Are officials getting righteous, or just trying to save face for the domestic red-light scene?
By Hank Hyena
[11/22/99]

Health Urge: Nancy Chan
Caught between Milt's lips and a hard Matt
No one trusts me anymore, not even the people I'm not lying to.
By Tracy Quan
[11/22/99]

Urge
Ex change
My ex-boyfriend called me with big news. Seems he wasn't quite my ex-boyfriend anymore.
By Sarah Gold
[11/20/99]

Column
I was a human crash-test dummy
For 15 years, a professor gave his body for human impact-survival research -- and lived to tell the tale.
By Mary Roach
[11/19/99]

Urge: Naked World
Naked suicide plague streaks across USA
Three recent unsuccessful attempts suggest a clothing-optional development in self-destruction.
By Hank Hyena
[11/19/99]

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Two pharmaceutical giants, Glaxo Wellcome and Roche, are launching massive campaigns to get Americans to shell out millions for new anti-flu remedies. But some of the scientists who have examined the drugs are skeptical they will do much more than fatten drug industry profits.

Each year from November to April, the influenza virus sickens up to 50 million Americans. As common infectious diseases go, it's a bad one. Healthy adults need about a week to emerge from the flu's boggy grip, and it kills about 20,000 sickly and elderly Americans each winter. Flu is also an enemy of the state in that it undercuts our efficiency -- costing $5 billion in lost work and hospital bills each season, according to the CDC.

Influenza's evolutionary strategy makes it easy to anthropomorphize as a Bill Gates among bugs -- brilliant, devious and sinister. There are dozens of varieties of flu and they mutate faster than Dennis Rodman's hair. Now and again, the molecular roulette wheel brings forth a pandemic strain unrecognizable to human immune systems; the worst of these was the 1918 virus that killed half a million Americans and 20 million souls worldwide.

Flu shots can be more or less effective protection, depending on whether the scientists who prepare the year's batch of vaccine correctly predict which strains will predominate in the population. The Clinton administration has advocated inoculation religiously, and this year 90 million Americans are expected to bare arms for the shot -- compared with 20 million a year ago.

But until now, once you got the flu the only recourse was to stay in bed with a wet washcloth and a cheesy novel nearby. This year, what passes for a cure has found its way to the market.

The new medications, Glaxo Wellcome's Relenza and Roche's Tamiflu, are the first in a class of drugs called neurominidase inhibitors. They work by neutralizing proteins on the viral surface that help the bug emerge from lung cells to replicate. If you haven't heard of Relenza and Tamiflu, $50 million says you will soon -- the two companies are estimated to be spending that amount to promote their drugs.

Obviously $50 million buys a lot of hype, and depending on how you look at it, hype may be the biggest ingredient in these drugs, which cost about $50 each for a five-day therapeutic course.

Glaxo's TV ads, produced by Saatchi and Saatchi, started airing last week. They star fat, obnoxious Wayne Knight (Newman from "Seinfeld") as the flu -- an unwanted guest who arrives at your house by bus.

The ad is intended to produce a vaguely uneasy feeling and send you reaching for the phone to get your doctor to write out a prophylactic prescription. But examining Relenza's trek through the regulatory system produces an equally queasy feeling, akin to seeing an important public figure unclothed -- an emperor, say, or perhaps Wayne Knight himself.

Consider this: The British and French medical establishments have already rejected Relenza as an essentially worthless drug. Despite much gnashing of the teeth by Glaxo Wellcome executives, who accused the British government of trying to destroy the country's pharmaceutical industry, Britain's National Institute of Clinical Excellence voted last month against including Relenza on the National Health Service's formulary.

In February, an expert panel asked by the FDA to offer a verdict on whether it should approve Relenza came to essentially the same decision as the French and British doctors. "I wasn't convinced by the data," says Edwin D. Kilbourne, a renowned New York virologist who served on the advisory committee, which voted 13-4 against Relenza.

Next page | The FDA approved the drugs against the advisory panel's recommendation