Drugs to cure avian influenza infection – multiple ways to prevent cell death

Yuan, S

Over the last decade, an endless stream of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), influenza (H1N1, H5N1, H7N9) and associated malignant respiratory diseases have emerged, which threatens the human health seriously. Because of their high mortality rate and infectious nature, these diseases usually cause psychological panic among the public that is more serious than the diseases themselves. As reported on 10 May 2013, of the 111 patients we studied 76.6% were admitted to an intensive care unit and 27.0% died. 1 New treatments and new drugs for avian influenza are developed continually, then why is there such a high mortality rate? We have to introspect about our current therapies for avian influenza and develop a better one. In this review, therapeutic uses of the drugs for avian influenza and associated pneumonia are summarized. In general, conventional therapies using only antiviral drugs resulted in 50-80% mortality rate, whereas the new therapies with antiviral drugs and immunomodulators reduced the mortality rate to 10-50%. However, this was still a high ratio. The main reason may be that not all cell death pathways induced by the AIV were blocked by the therapies (Figure 1 ). At the end of this review, a large reagent combination is proposed, which may greatly reduce the mortality rate prospectively.