Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 47,662
Thanks: 27,646
Thanked 14,458 Times in 10,262 Posts
|
re: COVID-19 > TOP 10 Countries DEATH RATE Tracker
British Scientists Find Breakthrough Drug Treatment in Fight Against Coronavirus
Dexamethasone is a Life-Saving Coronavirus Drug
Dexamethasone is a cheap and readily available steroid that has been in use for 60 years to treat ASTHMA & ARTHRITIS
Asthma and Arthritis-Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease and can have symptoms that appear in the lungs. Asthma is a totally different illness that results from inflammation of the airways and the bronchospasm that is caused by this inflammation.
It is possible to have both conditions at the same time.
BBC, 17 JUN 2020
A low-cost, widely used anti-inflammatory drug improved survival in patients with Covid-19, the first treatment to show life-saving promise months into the pandemic.
Deaths among patients who needed breathing assistance were lower over a period of four weeks when they received the 60-year-old medicine dexamethasone, University of Oxford researchers said Tuesday. The study was stopped early because of its crucial findings.
Doctors and companies are scouring for treatments that can help patients survive the new coronavirus, which has killed more than 430,000 people worldwide. Gilead Sciences Inc.’s antiviral remdesivir, which has approval to treat Covid-19, has only demonstrated the ability to shorten patients’ recovery.
Dexamethasone treatment reduced deaths by a third among patients on ventilators and by a fifth among those receiving oxygen only, the study showed.
U.K. Health Secretary Matt Han**** hailed the findings as an endorsement of the country’s scientific and medical prowess, as the government comes under growing scrutiny for its handling of the pandemic. Britain has the highest death toll from the virus in Europe, with about one-tenth of the global total of fatalities.
“In truth, U.K. life sciences are leading the world in vaccine development, in the development of treatments and in immunology,” Han**** said in a video message. “But it’s by working together that we’ve been able to bring this result to bear.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson also welcomed the breakthrough and said the drug will now be made available across Britain’s National Health Service.
MORE;
Covid-19 Can Damage Lungs of Victims Beyond Recognition, Expert Says
Organs of some who die after over a month in hospital sustain ‘complete disruption’, peers told
The Guardian UK, 17 JUN 2020
Covid-19 can leave the lungs of people who died from the disease completely unrecognisable, a professor of cardiovascular science has told parliament.
It created such massive damage in those who spent more than a month in hospital that it resulted in “complete disruption of the lung architecture”, said Prof Mauro Giacca of King’s College London.
In findings that he said showed the potential for “real problems” after survival, he told the Lords science and technology committee that he had studied the autopsies of patients who died in Italy after 30 to 40 days in intensive care and discovered large amounts of the virus persisting in lungs as well as highly unusual fused cells.
“What you find in the lungs of people who have stayed with the disease for more than a month before dying is something completely different from normal pneumonia, influenza or the Sars virus,” he said. “You see massive thrombosis. There is a complete disruption of the lung architecture – in some lights you can’t even distinguish that it used to be a lung.
“There are large numbers of very big fused cells which are virus positive with as many as 10, 15 nuclei,” he said. “I am convinced this explains the unique pathology of Covid-19. This is not a disease caused by a virus which kills cells, which had profound implications for therapy.”
His evidence came as the Lords committee heard from medical scientists and doctors grappling with the nature of Covid-19 six months after its emergence in Europe, its behaviour, treatments, vaccines and the possibility of immunity.
Sir John Bell, a professor of medicine at Oxford University who is a member of the government’s coronavirus vaccine taskforce, said attempts to understand whether people who have had the disease gather any immunity would need to be tested during a second wave of infections in the UK, which he said was now likely.
“Given the lockdown has now been largely released, we are now back in action and we still have a pretty reasonable level of infections in the community, I would be very surprised if we avoided a second wave,” he said. “I think the real question is are we going to have a number of outbursts and then a second wave or are we just going to get a second wave.”
A new peak would likely allow Public Health England to test immunity on about 100,000 healthcare workers who had tested positive and so might have antibodies, he said. Whether they get reinfected will help show how immunity works but without a new peak it will be hard to find out.
The committee also heard from Prof Adrian Hayday, the chair of the department of immunobiology at King’s College London, who supported arguments that socioeconomic factors were key to understanding why there had been high levels of infections among black and minority ethnic communities in the UK.
“In studies of patients in London hospitals, black, African, Asian and minority groups show higher rates of admission to hospital, which shows they are more likely to have become infected under conditions where the virus dose is maybe high,” he said.
“But once they are in hospital they do just as well as anybody. The hypothesis is they are disproportionately suffering from socioeconomic factors that make them more likely to receive high-frequency, high doses of infection. That is not to say the hypothesis is correct, but it is perfectly valid until proven otherwise.”
|