After months of avoiding the inevitable, Japan’s health minister has finally agreed to open a new inquiry to examine any links between Tamiflu and abnormal behaviour after a spate of recent teenage deaths. The move, which includes seeking expert opinions, comes after Tokyo insisted there is no clear evidence of a causal link between the pill and the incidents.

“We need to go over it again as accidents involving young people occurred quite often,” says health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa, who earlier this week instructed doctors and hospitals not to give Tamiflu to teenagers. “It’s not that we have any new knowledge about the drug, but there is no excuse for doing nothing after a series of accidents.”

Tell it to Rokuro Hama, who heads the Japan Institute of Pharmacovigilance and reviewed the health ministry’s own data of usage and incidents. For weeks, he’s repeatedly told anyone who would listen that the ratio of people displaying abnormal behavior is “four times greater” after immediately taking Roche’s pill.

Around 1,800 cases of side-effects from Tamiflu have been reported since February 2001, when the pill became available in Japan, which buys about 60 percent of the world’s supply of Tamiflu over fears of bird flu. Since 2004, the ministry says its’ received 22 reports of abnormal behaviour, including four deaths. Of those, 15 were teenagers and seven adults.

Read more in…
The Associated Press;
and Pharmalot.
[tags]Chugai Pharmaceuticals, Roche, Tamiflu[/tags]