Bad news on the potential treatment front:

WASHINGTON — In a development health experts are calling alarming, two bird flu patients in Vietnam died after developing resistance to Tamiflu, the key drug that governments are stockpiling in case of a large-scale outbreak.

The experts said the deaths were disturbing because the two girls had received early and aggressive treatment with Tamiflu and had gotten the recommended doses.

The new report suggests that the doses doctors now consider ideal may be too little. Previous reports of resistance involved people who had taken the drug in low doses; inadequate doses of medicine are known to promote resistance by allowing viruses or bacteria to mutate and make a resurgence.

What makes this particularly disturbing, is that if the doses were indeed inadequate then governments will have to increase the amount of stockpiling of tamiflu. It is challenging enough to stockpile the amount of drug necessary, based on what were thought to be the correct doses, but now the difficulty of that challenge appears to have potentially increased greatly.