Can Tamiflu prevent the Flu?

Just watched a supposedly competent pharmacists mocking the people trying to prevent swine flu by taking Tamiflu. Apparently many are buying Tamiflu from spammers and dubious online pharmacies for sometimes exorbitant prices. These unwashed masses, however, are right and many of the so-called “experts” on TV are wrong. Tamiflu (Oseltamivir) and Zanamivir, another antiviral, can be used for prophylaxis, see for example here or here.

Being right doesn’t mean that those people aren’t idiots. Unless you’re in Mexico or treating infected people, you’re still very unlikely to be exposed to the new virus. And if you’re in a developed country it’s probably better to get infected now than later, when the virus could have mutated and become more harmful, medical supplies have been exhausted and hospitals are overwhelmed. Get swine flu right now and you’ll see a Nobel Prize reunion happening at your bedside plus immunity for the rest of your life.

The Heilbronn DNA Mixup

I wish I’d written earlier about this to appear really smart. Anyway, here’s the backstory: DNA traces of an unknown eastern-European woman had been found at almost

The Culprit

17 crime scenes, including two murders (including a 22 year old police officer) but also car jackings, unprofessional break-ins and on a bullet fired in a marital dispute. The crimes where spread around a large area including south-west Germany, France and Switzerland.

It now turns out that the several-hundred-men task force might have really been chasing a phantom. Alarmed by the apparent randomness of the crimes, involving both highly professional work and seemingly amateur break-ins, they started checking for contaminations in the labwork. The likeliest suspect now are the cotton swabs used to collect evidence at the crime scene. All the swabs used in the forensics works were sourced from the same supplier, a company in northern Germany that employs several eastern-European women that would fit the profile. Even more inciminating, the state of Bavaria lies right in the center of the crimes’ locations, without ever finding matching DNA in crimes on its territory. Guess what: they get their cotton swabs from a different supplier.

While the suspicion had already been growing in the last few months, the smoking gun apparently was a case where they tried to match a burned (male) corpse to DNA collected from fingerprint samples an asylum-seeker had given a few months earlier. The first test showed a match between those fingerprints and the Phantom’s DNA while a second test did not.

By the way: contaminated cotton swabs aren”t as trivial to avoid as one might think. It’s relatively easy to sterilize cotton to prevent infections. Forensics however require a complete destruction or removal of any DNA contamination, which is apparently a lot harder.