Tuesday, December 1, 2009

No more drug-resistant H1N1 found at Duke

Updated: Today at 1:22 p.m.

Extensive testing has found no more cases of drug-resistant H1N1 flu at Duke University Hospital, officials said Tuesday.

The hospital reported on Nov. 20 that two men and two women had contracted a strain of the virus that was resistant to the drug Tamiflu, one of two medicines used to fight H1N1. Both men and one woman died.

The patients had been treated in an isolated unit of the hospital in the six weeks prior to the Nov. 20 announcement, and all had underlying compromised immune systems and other complex medical conditions at the time, officials said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state Division of Public Health worked with Duke Hospital to test all other patients in the isolated unit several times in recent days. Other people being treated for H1N1 at the hospital also were tested.

"Much work is still being done to better understand the nature of the four cases that were reported previously," Dr. Daniel Sexton, an infectious disease specialist and director of the Duke Infection Control Outreach Network, said in a statement.

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