© Tim Wimborne / Reuters
The British Health Department website says: "Whilst there is doubt about how swine flu affects children, we believe that a safety-first approach of offering antivirals to everyone remains the most sensible and responsible way forward".
Australian health officials offer similar advice. But now questions are being raised about whether it is the right way to go.
Research by Dr Matthew Thompson, a clinical scientist and Oxford GP, and Dr Carl Heneghan, a GP and clinical lecturer at Oxford University, found that in some children Tamiflu caused vomiting which can lead to dehydration and complications.
Dr Thompson said it was inappropriate for Tamiflu and Relenza to be given to most of the children who demonstrate just mild flu symptoms.
"The effect of these drugs is fairly small for most children," he said.
"There are always going to be some children with very serious underlying health problems, as well as some adults for which the situation is different, but for most children who are having a mild flu-like illness the benefit of these drugs appears to be fairly small."
This latest study reviewed seven clinical trials, four of them involving children under the age of 12. The children were being treated for normal seasonal flu but the experts behind the research said their findings would extend to the current swine flu pandemic.
The report comes 10 days after reports that more than half of the 248 students in the UK, given Tamiflu after a classmate fell ill with swine flu, suffered side effects such as nausea, insomnia and nightmares.
"There's always going to be a balance in terms of the potential benefits of that treatment and the potential harms," Dr Thompson said.
"And for the antiviral drugs we found that the benefit is fairly small for children with seasonal flu. They're likely to get better about one day more quickly if they're given one of these drugs. And the downside of course is that the studies that have been published so far aren't big enough to let us know how effective these drugs are at preventing children getting very serious complications."
Britain's current health policy saw more than 315,000 courses of antivirals handed out in the first fortnight after the launch of the UK's national pandemic flu helpline.
Professor Alan Maryon-Davis is the president of the UK's Faculty of Public Health. He concedes that there may be a problem with over-prescription of the drugs.
"I think there's a danger that we might get a resistance developing to the antivirals," he said. "Of course that ... could be a major problem if this virus comes back again with a vengeance in the autumn as we're expecting it to do so. So there are some worries there."
The UK's chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, has released a statement in response to this new report. He says he welcomes the research but says it is limited in its scope and tentative in its finding. He stresses that antivirals remain the only weapon against the H1N1 virus.
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