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The World Health Organisation (WHO) is studying reports that amantadine, an older generation of antiviral drug, could prove effective in fighting bird flu, raising the prospect of cheaper and more widely available treatments.
Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the WHO, said laboratory tests in recent months suggested the drug had prevented strains of the H5N1 virus, identified in Indonesia and China, from replicating.
The drug potentially offers an additional tool alongside Tamiflu, which has been the focus of stockpiling efforts by governments in recent months in the effort to prepare for a potential future pandemic.
Tamiflu, which is principally manufactured by Roche of Switzerland, remains under patent at relatively high prices, and demand is significantly outstripping supply. Amantadine is a generic drug produced cheaply by a range of companies.
But Roche warned that there were signs of resistance to amantadine by the virus, and a number of medicines regulators in recent months have warned of the dangers of using the older generation drug.
The WHO ended recently a three-day conference studying ways to contain a pandemic in its early stages, largely through the use of blanket coverage of Tamiflu alongside quarantine measures.
Scientists discover how to pass exams
Psychologists have made an intriguing discovery that could have profound implica tions for our understanding of human learning mechanisms - and immediate significance for students revising for examinations.
The scientists, from Washington University in St Louis, found that students understood and retained information more readily when subjected to frequent tests and quizzes while studying than students who simply read material over and over again.
"Our study indicates that testing can be used as a powerful means for improving learning, not just assessing it," said Prof Henry Roediger of the university's psychology department.
The results are published in the current issue of Psychological Science. According to Prof Roediger, students who relied on repeated study alone frequently developed a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the materials even while their grasp of important detail was sliding away. By comparison, students who were either tested repeatedly or tested themselves while revising scored dramatically higher marks. A group of students who read a piece of text 14 times, for example, recalled less than a self-testing group who had read the piece only three or four times. The cause of the phenomenon remains uncovered: one theory is that we learn more efficiently in difficult situations.
Nudear fusion bubble bursts
Doubt was cast recently on the credibility of experiments that seemed to suggest potentially limitless amounts of energy could be derived from collapsing bubbles.
In 2002 the physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan claimed to have conducted experiments in which nuclear fusion the chemical reaction that powers the sun - was achieved when bubbles created in acetone using a pulse of neutrons collapsed.
The physics is real enough - theoretically the temperature inside a collapsing bubble only one millimetre in diameter can rise as high as the centre of the sun. But other scientists doubted whether this could result in nuclear fusion and the generation of energy, as Mr Taleyarkhan claimed.
Now, the latest issue of Nature magazine reports that Mr Taleyarkhan's colleagues at Pardue University, Indiana, say their confidence in his work has been damaged.
Lefteri Tsoukalas, Tatjana Jevremovic and others say that he has removed apparatus with which they were trying to replicate his findings, and say he claimed positive results for experiments for which they never saw the raw data. He opposed publication of their own, negative, results.
Those who remember the "cold fusion" controversy of a few years ago will reflect that dreams of unlimited energy from simple materials and equipment are likely to remain just that. (FT Syndication Service)
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