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Tamiflu
built 635 days ago
A problem with Tamiflu is that there is a severe shortage of Tamiflu in bird-flu-anxious Europe. Well, maybe there is no shortage in a real sense (the total number of bird flu patients to date is around 100, and zero in Europe), but there exists a sizeable gap between angry demand and actual supply. Roche (Hoffman-La Roche) holds the only license to the patent and is the sole manufacturer of the drug. In view of a possible bird flu pandemic, Roche has come under pressure to make Tamiflu available to other manufacturers as well. A problem with that is that Roche maintains that there is a severe shortage of raw material, i.e. of the Star anise grown in China -- some 90% of the harvest is reportedly already used by Roche, not leaving very much to other manufacturers (or to the makers of the aperitif Pernod, by the way -- horrible).
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Tamiflu