MEDRXIV 09/01/21 Efficacy of propolis as an adjunct treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients: a randomized, controlled clinical trial. PLOS 25/03/21 Inactivated rabies virus vectored SARS-CoV-2 vaccine prevents disease in a Syrian hamster model. Abstract Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is an emergent coronavirus that has caused a worldwide pandemic.
Although human disease is often asymptomatic, some develop severe illnesses such as pneumonia, respiratory failure, and death. There is an urgent need for a vaccine to prevent its rapid spread as asymptomatic infections accounting for up to 40% of transmission events. ABC_NET_AU 29/01/21 Meat workers prioritised for COVID vaccine, but no decision on delivery date or if jabs mandatory. The head of Australia's largest meat cooperative would like to see the COVID-19 vaccine made mandatory for its workers to ensure it provides a safe workplace.
The meat processing sector has been listed as "high risk" and workers are included in Phase 1b, the second stage of the Federal Government's National Rollout Strategy of the vaccine. Health workers and emergency staff are in the first stage commencing late February. The meat industry had pushed governments to prioritise its workers in the vaccine rollout and while they are not first in line the decision to put them in Phase 1b has been welcomed by Simon Stahl, the CEO of The Casino Food Co-op (formerly the Northern Cooperative Meat Company in northern New South Wales). Abattoir workers in Australia are already required to be vaccinated against Q fever — a highly infectious and potentially debilitating disease spread from animals to humans. Mr Stahl conceded there were two sides to the vaccine debate.
Abattoirs are high risk. AFR. J. FOOD AGRIC. NUTR. DEV. - DEC 2020 - New Publication of Interest : Surviving Covid-19: The Neglected Remedy. Cecilia Moraa Onyango (PhD) is an Associate professor of Horticulture at the University of Nairobi, Kenya.
She has over 18 years’ experience in training, research and community outreach in the areas of crop production systems, post-harvest handling of produce, standards and food safety. www.plantscience.uonbi.ac.ke John Wilson is a Zimbabwean free-range facilitator and activist working with organisations across Africa, from community based to large continental networks. He has worked in the agroecology field in Zimbabwe and Africa for over forty years. spiritvaults13@gmail.com Peter Gubbels has 28 years of experience in West Africa, lives in northern Ghana, and works with rural communities to promote sustainable agriculture, agroecology, and nutrition. He is a co-founder of Groundswell International. www.groundswellinternational.org Peter Ogera Mokaya (MD) is a public health physician, with over 30 years’ experience in the practice of health development.
BIOMOLECULES 30/12/20 Potential Medicinal Plants for the Treatment of Dengue Fever and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus. While dengue virus (DENV) infection imposes a serious challenge to the survival of humans worldwide, severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (SARS-CoV) remains the most devastating pandemic in human history.
A significant number of studies have shown that plant-derived substances could serve as potential candidates for the development of safe and efficacious remedies for combating these diseases. Different scientific databases were used to source for literature on plants used against these infections. ►▼ Show Figures Figure 1 This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
CIDRAP 30/12/20 UK becomes first country to green-light AstraZeneca COVID vaccine. The United Kingdom today became the first country to approve the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, and its vaccine advisory group also recommended spacing out doses of it and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to allow greater numbers of high-risk people to be vaccinated.
The announcement comes on the 1-year anniversary of the first English language reports of an unexplained pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, and as the UK battles a more transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2 that was confirmed just a few weeks ago. Vaccine approval came with strategy to expand reach The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is a viral-vector vaccine that can be kept at normal refrigeration temperatures, which will ease its rollout across a wide range of immunization settings, including lower-income countries and remote settings.
Interim analysis suggests that the overall efficacy for the vaccine is 70.4%, the company said in a statement. FARMERSWEEKLY_CO_ZA 04/01/21 Public warned against using ivermectin to treat COVID-19. South Africans have been warned not to use the parasiticide, ivermectin, as a preventative or curative treatment for COVID-19.
This is after the international debate on the drug’s effectiveness against the disease reached local shores late last year. Some South Africans are taking to social media to show themselves ingesting ivermectin that is registered only for animal use in this country. Dr Peter Oberem, CEO of South African animal health products provider, Afrivet, said that while a number of international scientific articles supported the theory that ivermectin could possibly prevent or cure COVID-19 infections, South Africa’s ivermectin products “are not registered as human medicine” and “have been tested for safety in animals, not humans”. Oberem’s stance was echoed by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) that confirmed in a statement that ivermectin was neither indicated nor approved by SAHPRA for use in humans.
ARCHIVES OF VIROLOGY 02/11/20 Tetracycline and viruses: a possible treatment for COVID-19? BIORXIV 22/11/20 Anti-COVID-19 efficacy of ivermectin in the golden hamster. BIORXIV 30/01/20 Therapeutic Drugs Targeting 2019-nCoV Main Protease by High-Throughput Screening. BIORXIV 14/03/20 Development of CRISPR as a prophylactic strategy to combat novel coronavirus and influenza.
CELL RESEARCH 04/02/20 Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro. In December 2019, a novel pneumonia caused by a previously unknown pathogen emerged in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China.
The initial cases were linked to exposures in a seafood market in Wuhan.1 As of January 27, 2020, the Chinese authorities reported 2835 confirmed cases in mainland China, including 81 deaths. Additionally, 19 confirmed cases were identified in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and 39 imported cases were identified in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, United States, Vietnam, Singapore, Nepal, France, Australia and Canada. The pathogen was soon identified as a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which is closely related to sever acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV).2 Currently, there is no specific treatment against the new virus. Therefore, identifying effective antiviral agents to combat the disease is urgently needed. An efficient approach to drug discovery is to test whether the existing antiviral drugs are effective in treating related viral infections. Zhonghua Jie He He Hu Xi Za Zhi. 2020 Feb 20; [Expert consensus on chloroquine phosphate for the treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia].
OPEN FORUM INFECTIOUS DISEAESS 23/03/20 COVID-19 Treatment: A Review of Early and Emerging Options. FAPESP_BR 22/04/20 Brazilian researchers test treatment with antibodies from patients who have recovered from COVID-19. Scientists affiliated with the FAPESP-funded Center for Cell-Based Therapy have collected plasma from donors and are conducting a trial to check the safety and effectiveness of passive immunization (photo: CTC) April 22, 2020 By Maria Fernanda Ziegler | Agência FAPESP – The transfusion of antibodies produced by people who have recovered from COVID-19 could be used to treat moderate and severe cases of the disease.
To test the efficacy of this strategy, blood plasma containing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 will be administered to 45 patients at the Ribeirão Preto Blood Center in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, attached to the hospital run in the city by the University of São Paulo (HC-FMRP-USP). The technique is known as passive immunity transfer and is also being tested in other countries, including China, France, Italy and the United States. “We don’t yet have licensed vaccines or drugs for COVID-19, so it’s important to test this strategy. Tried and tested. WIKIPEDIA - COVID-19 drug development. Preventative vaccines and therapies for COVID-19 infection COVID-19 drug development is the research process to develop a preventative vaccine or therapeutic prescription drug that would alleviate the severity of 2019-20 coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
Internationally as of mid-April 2020, some 225 drug companies, biotechnology firms, university research groups, and health organizations were developing 115 vaccine candidates[1] and 138 potential therapies for COVID-19 disease in various stages of preclinical or clinical research.[2] By April, four potential post-infection therapies – favipiravir, remdesivir, lopinavir and hydroxychloroquine (or chloroquine) – were in the final stage of human testing[2][3][16][23] – Phase III-IV clinical trials – and five vaccine candidates had entered the first stage of human safety evaluation, Phase I.[1]
PIGSITE 06/04/20 New research shows common antiparasitic treatment could help battle COVID-19. Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne have shown that the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin can reduce and kill the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19, 48 hours after exposure.
The trial demonstrated that a single dose of Ivermectin could stop SARS-CoV-2 growing in cell culture. Though this sounds promising, health authorities are warning people against self-medicating with Ivermectin as it could be fatal. The current research has not provided any information on appropriate dosage or delivery. Additional trials need to be carried out in humans before Ivermectin can be safely used. Dr Kylie Wagstaff, who led the study, explains, “We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it.
WIKIPEDIA - COVID-19 drug repurposing research. Drug repurposing research related to COVID-19 Drug repositioning (also known as drug repurposing, re-profiling, re-tasking or therapeutic switching) is the repurposing of an approved drug for the treatment of a different disease or medical condition than that for which it was originally developed.[1] This is one line of scientific research which is currently being pursued to develop safe and effective COVID-19 treatments.[2][3] Other research directions include the development of a COVID-19 vaccine[4] and convalescent plasma transfusion.[5] SARS-CoV-2 has about 66 druggable proteins, each of which has multiple ligand binding sites.[6] Analyzing those binding sites provide the reasonable project of developing effective antiviral drug against COVID-19 proteins.
Of the most important SARS-CoV-2 target proteins are papain-like protease, RNA dependent RNA polymerase, helicase, S protein, and ADP ribophosphatase. Studies[edit] SKY NEWS 22/04/20 Coronavirus: Scientists in China find 33 mutations of virus in warning to vaccine developers. Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. Verizon Media and our partners need your consent to access your device and use your data (including location) to understand your interests, and provide and measure personalised ads. Verizon Media will also provide you with personalised ads on partner products. Learn more. To give you a better overall experience, we want to provide relevant ads that are more useful to you. For example, when you search for a film, we use your search information and location to show the most relevant cinemas near you.
Learn more about how Verizon Media collects and uses data and how our partners collect and use data. BIORXIV 04/05/20 Feline coronavirus drug inhibits the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 and blocks virus replication. NATURE 16/03/20 Don’t rush to deploy COVID-19 vaccines and drugs without sufficient safety guarantees. Around the world, I am seeing efforts to support ‘quick-fix’ programmes aimed at developing vaccines and therapeutics against COVID-19. Groups in the United States and China are already planning to test vaccines in healthy human volunteers. Make no mistake, it’s essential that we work as hard and fast as possible to develop drugs and vaccines that are widely available across the world. But it is important not to cut corners. Vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox and influenza have a long history of safe use and were developed in line with requirements of regulatory agencies. BMJ 18/05/20 How covid-19 is accelerating the threat of antimicrobial resistance.
Healthcare responses to the novel coronavirus may be hastening another long looming public health threat, writes Jeremy Hsu The global threat of antimicrobial resistant bacteria and other superbugs is worsening as many patients admitted to hospital with covid-19 receive antibiotics to keep secondary bacterial infections in check. “Since the emergence of covid-19, collected data have shown an increase in antibiotic use, even though most of the initial illnesses being treated have been from covid-19 viral infection,” says Dawn Sievert, senior science advisor for antibiotic resistance at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “The resulting increased exposure to healthcare settings and invasive procedures, along with expanded antibiotic use, amplifies the opportunity for resistant pathogens to emerge and spread.” FAPESP 20/05/20 Use of anticoagulant medication leads to 70% reduction in cell infection by novel coronavirus. The graph (A) shows the conformational change to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the presence of heparin.
In the image of the spike protein (B), the dark blue regions represent the potential heparin binding sites (image: INFAR-UNESP) May 20, 2020 By Elton Alisson | Agência FAPESP – A study conducted by Brazilian researchers affiliated with the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and European collaborators has revealed a possible novel mechanism of the drug heparin in the treatment of COVID-19. In addition to combating coagulation disorders that affect lung vessels and impair oxygenation, heparin also appears to hinder cell penetration by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. BLOG FRONTIERS 01/05/20 Cytokine storms and T cell counts may offer clues on how to treat COVID-19. — by Nora Belblidia, Frontiers Science Writer Cytokine storms may affect the severity of COVID-19 cases by lowering T cell counts, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Immunology.
Researchers studying coronavirus cases in China found that sick patients had a significantly low number of T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a crucial role in immune response, and that T cell counts were negatively correlated with case severity. Interestingly, they also found a high concentration of cytokines, a protein that normally helps fight off infection. Too many cytokines can trigger an excessive inflammatory response known as a cytokine storm, which causes the proteins to attack healthy cells. The study suggests that coronavirus does not attack T cells directly, but rather triggers the cytokine release, which then drives the depletion and exhaustion of T cells.
J Immunol Methods. Jun-Jul 2020 In the Search of Potential Epitopes for Wuhan Seafood Market Pneumonia Virus Using High Order Nullomers. 1. Introduction. FAPESP_BR 01/07/20 Researchers seek antiviral molecules for the treatment of COVID-19. Synthetic compounds and molecules derived from natural products belonging to Brazil’s biodiversity are being screened by teams at the Center for Innovation in Biodiversity and Drug Discovery, which is supported by FAPESP (photo: Daniel Antonio / Agência FAPESP) July 01, 2020. CNN 16/06/20 Human trials expected to start next month for Covid-19 treatment derived from cows' blood.
But these aren't just any cows. Scientists genetically engineered the animals to give them an immune system that's part human. That way, the animals produce disease-fighting human antibodies to Covid-19, which are then turned into a drug to attack the virus. "These animals are producing neutralizing antibodies that kill [the novel coronavirus] in the laboratory," Eddie Sullivan, CEO of SAB Biotherapeutics said in a statement to CNN. ABC7 18/06/20 Coronavirus: Black market cure for cats with feline infectious peritonitis is illegal, but is saving thousands of lives. Cats are facing a pandemic of their own: a coronavirus strain that's estimated to kill tens of thousands of cats worldwide every year. Feline infectious coronavirus, also known as FIP, is not a new virus and it is a different strain than the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans.
Until now, it's been a death sentence for cats who develop the most severe forms of the infection. Most cats develop the feline coronavirus at some point in their lives, but show little to no symptoms. In some cats, however, the virus mutates -- causing the deadly FIP. EUREKALERT 09/07/20 Pasteurizing breast milk inactivates SARS-CoV-2. FAPESP_BR 15/07/20 Combining different vaccines could extend protection against COVID-19, scientists believe. BIORXIV 06/08/20 Peptide Antidotes to SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) NATURE 24/08/20 The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers - Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.
Wealthy countries have struck deals to buy more than two billion doses of coronavirus vaccine in a scramble that could leave limited supplies in the coming year. Meanwhile, an international effort to acquire vaccines for low- and middle-income countries is struggling to gain traction. Most experts say that late 2020 or early 2021 is the soonest vaccines could be approved and rolled out; they must first undergo large-scale phase III clinical trials to assess their effectiveness and safety.
(Russia has approved a vaccine for limited use, but it hasn’t completed phase III trials.) CORNELL ALLIANCE FOR SCIENCE 06/05/20 GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work to make it a reality. While large companies and public sector consortiums in the United States, Canada, China and Europe are running at full speed to develop a vaccine grown in genetically modified (GM) tobacco plants, a research group at a Mexican university is working toward the same objective, but with a different and innovative strategy.
They are using bioinformatics and computational genetic engineering to identify candidate antigens for a vaccine that can be expressed in tomato plants.