On Saturday, a teenager reportedly jumped from a sixth-floor apartment window. He was found unconscious but alive after suffering serious fractures to his arms and legs. Now it’s suspected that he may have experienced hallucinations after taking the medication Tamiflu. In Japan, there were allegedly fifteen incidents of such from 2004 to 2007. The boy does not remember anything about the incident.
I hope that this leads to more caution regarding the use of antimicrobial medications. They’re not candy. They’re drugs and can have side effects, and can also lead to drug-resistant microbes, which is something that should be taken more seriously than it is. In Korea, people take medicine and come to work sick, instead of resting at home and letting the body’s own remarkable ability to heal itself take its natural course. (Remember that Koreans work the longest hours in the OECD.) If you recuperate at home, you’re “lazy.” Also, I think that, amongst the men, there’s some machismo involved; if you don’t come to work despite being ill, you’re “weak.”
Update:
According to police, the fourteen-year-old reported hallucinations about taking Tamiflu, and yet, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs claims that there is very little to link the teenager’s fall to the drug. It isn’t commonplace for teenagers to hallucinate in Korea, a country with very strict anti-drug laws. Jumping from buildings isn’t rare, as it’s a common suicide method, but the boy wasn’t trying to kill himself.
In slightly-related news, workers at Gaesong, the industrial park in North Korea operated jointly with South Korea, have been provided with Tamiflu as a precautionary measure, “to be used in emergency situations.”
