Malaria drug won’t stop COVID-19 deaths: WHO official

Malaria drug won’t stop COVID-19 deaths: WHO official

The World Health Organisation’s top scientist says it’s now been definitively proven that the cheap malaria drug hydroxychloroquine the drug favoured by President Donald Trump doesn’t work in stopping deaths among people hospitalized with the new coronavirus.

But Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said there could still be a role for the drug in preventing people from catching COVID-19 in the first place and noted that clinical trials testing hydroxychloroquine’s role in this are ongoing.

Swaminathan said in a press briefing on Thursday that there is still a gap in determining whether hydroxychloroquine has a role at all in the prevention or minimizing the severity of the illness in early infection or even in preventing it.

She says: We don’t know that as yet. And we need to complete those large trials and get the data, she said, referring to several other trials not being conducted by WHO.

The UN health agency announced this week that it is suspending the hydroxychloroquine arm of its own trial testing various experimental therapies for COVID-19, referring to previous results from a large UK trial and a separate analysis of the evidence on the drug.

The other drugs being tested by WHO, including treatments used in the past for Ebola and AIDS, are still being pursued.

US hospitals using malaria drug in treatment of COVID-19 patients: Report

US hospitals using malaria drug in treatment of COVID-19 patients: Report

Washington: Several hospitals in the United States continue to use malaria drug hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 positive patients, a media report said.

Medical publication, MDedge on Friday reported that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the malaria drug, is currently the first-line therapy and Tocilizumab the second-line medication for people hospitalized with polymerase chain reaction-confirmed COVID-19 infection in the Yale-New Haven Health System, which operates hospitals across Connecticut.

Hydroxychloroquine is first-line at Yale because in-vitro data shows potent inhibition of the virus and possible clinical benefit, which is about as good as evidence gets at the moment, Indian American cardiologist Nihar Desai told the medical publication.

“It’s cheap, it’s been used for decades, and people are relatively comfortable with it,” he added.

“We are trying to do the best we can. One hopes we never have to go through anything like this (coronavirus pandemic) again,” Desai told MDedge.

His home institution, Yale New Haven Hospital, is almost half full with COVID-19 patients, at more than 400, the report said.

On Friday, US Food and Drug Administration gave emergency use authorization (EUA) for the use of investigational anti-viral Remdesivir for the treatment of COVID 19 patients.

HCQ was the first drug to receive EAU from FDA for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

US President Donald Trump has been an advocate of the use of HCQ, which has reportedly cured patients in New York and several other place.

Reports indicate that the malaria drug has been effective during the initial phases of a person being infected by coronavirus but poses a danger to those having heart ailments.

At the request of Trump, India had exported 50 million tablets of hydroxychloroquine to the United States.