The use of antiviral drugs has been recognized as the primary public
health strategy for mitigating the severity of a new influenza pandemic
strain. However, the success of this strategy requires the prompt onset of
therapy within 48 hours of the appearance of clinical symptoms. The
evolution of drug resistance in the virus can also pose a problem for
antiviral treatment strategies. I'll present a compartmental model that
monitors the density of infected individuals in terms of the time elapsed
since the onset of symptoms. Such a model can be expressed by a system of
delay differential equations with both discrete and distributed delays,
and is based on the interaction between viral dynamics at the host level
and the spread of the disease in the population. It shows that treatment
alone is unlikely to control an outbreak unless other control measures to
reduce the spread of disease are also in place. Furthermore, we show that
levels of treatment that have a chance of controlling the disease will
also drive the emergence of drug resistant outbreaks. While an antiviral
treatment is helpful for containing a pandemic, its effectiveness depends
critically on timely and strategic use of drugs.