Flu Bug Wins the War on Drugs

The first time I heard that the flu bug was becoming resistant to medications, I was in sixth grade. Our teacher tended to wander away from the usual topics a bit, and that particular digression struck me as especially frightening as she spelled out a doomsday scenario where no medication would or could protect my classmates and me from violent illness—perhaps even death. But there was no epidemic that year.

Today the headline “Flu bug developing resistance to drugs” has no affect on my psyche whatsoever. The relatively few flu bugs I’ve contracted over the years did little to increase my interest in what sometimes appears to be a story contrived simply to frighten the public into paying closer attention to news alerts. The literally hundreds of reports about the constantly mutating flu virus since that day have removed whatever ominous power that warning once had.

This latest report is different.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is seriously concerned—and with cause. For the first time in history, the organization has warned doctors not to prescribe two common antiviral drugs (rimantadine and amantadine) to treat h3n2, the most dominant form of flu virus, because they simply will not work. Just two years ago, less than 2 percent of samples were resistant to these drugs; today, 91 percent of samples are resistant to these frontline medications. The speed of the mutation is cause for alarm.

Could a simple household flu become an epidemic? Every year, about 36,000 people die from the flu; 200,000 are hospitalized in the United States alone. As of December 31, flu activity was already considered widespread in seven U.S. states in what appears to be a particularly strong flu season.

Other medications are still widely available this year that the flu has not yet overcome. But the ability of viruses to rapidly adapt and change to overcome medications is clearly on the rise. Tamiflu will defeat the flu this year; what about next year? What about 10 years from now?

Still more foreboding, tuberculosis and hiv have also gained resistance to frontline medications recently. Is bird flu next? A simple mutation is all that is needed to turn bird flu warnings from merely an ominous headline into the worst pandemic in modern times. Despite the billions of dollars world governments are spending to prevent a pandemic, the leader of the World Health Organization says it is only a matter of time before an avian-flu virus acquires the ability to jump from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza. The last such pandemic—the Spanish Flu in 1918—killed 40 million people.

These aren’t the same old flu warnings we heard as kids. A confluence of negative conditions has set the stage for disease epidemics of biblical proportions—which is exactly what we will see. Scripture says there will be diseases and pestilences as the pale horse of the apocalypse rides across the land.

As curses for disobedience to God, Deuteronomy 28 warns about consumption (chronic, degenerative diseases such as aids), inflammation (malaria or communicative diseases such as influenzas), emerods (tumors, cancer, etc.) and other diseases “whereof thou canst not be healed” (verse 27). In other words, diseases become more than resistant to drugs—they are incurable!

While the anti-viral drugs, vaccines, and other advances of modern medicine that people look to as saviors will prove to be of little help, there is a sure Savior you can call upon for protection from the coming pandemics. Write us for a free copy of Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The Plain Truth About Healing for an in-depth biblical study of this life-changing subject.