Japanese flu drug 'clearly effective' in treating coronavirus, says China by captaincrunch

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Japanese flu drug 'clearly effective' in treating coronavirus, says China

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 18, 2020 13:41
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Wednesday, March 18, 2020 11:21 AM

... stay crunchy...

Caveat emptor, massive grains of salt, don't write a check your butt can't cash, fwiw, trap! drug money grab, yadda yadda...

Twitter:

Dr. Dena Grayson
@DrDenaGrayson
MD, PhD. Expert on #Ebola, #coronavirus, pandemics. Appearances on @FoxNews (oh no!) @SkyNews @BBC featured in @NYTimes @BostonGlobe

Floridadenagrayson.com

#China says a flu drug approved in #Japan was effective in a study of 340 #coronavirus patients.

Lung X-rays showed improvements in ~91% of patients treated with #favipiravir, compared to 62% of those not treated with drug.

Elsewhere:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/japanese-flu-drug-clearl
y-effective-in-treating-coronavirus-says-china

Japanese flu drug 'clearly effective' in treating coronavirus, says China
Shares in Fujifilm Toyama Chemical, which developed favipiravir, surged after praise by Chinese official following

Wed 18 Mar 2020 07.56 EDT First published on Wed 18 Mar 2020 02.55 EDT

Medical authorities in China have said a drug used in Japan to treat new strains of influenza appeared to be effective in coronavirus patients, Japanese media said on Wednesday.

Zhang Xinmin, an official at China’s science and technology ministry, said favipiravir, developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm, had produced encouraging outcomes in clinical trials in Wuhan and Shenzhen involving 340 patients.

“It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” Zhang told reporters on Tuesday.

Patients who were given the medicine in Shenzhen turned negative for the virus after a median of four days after becoming positive, compared with a median of 11 days for those who were not treated with the drug, public broadcaster NHK said.

In addition, X-rays confirmed improvements in lung condition in about 91% of the patients who were treated with favipiravir, compared to 62% or those without the drug.

Fujifilm Toyama Chemical, which developed the drug – also known as Avigan – in 2014, has declined to comment on the claims.

Shares in the firm surged on Wednesday following Zhang’s comments, closing the morning up 14.7% at 5,207 yen, having briefly hit their daily limit high of 5,238 yen.

Doctors in Japan are using the same drug in clinical studies on coronavirus patients with mild to moderate symptoms, hoping it will prevent the virus from multiplying in patients.

But a Japanese health ministry source suggested the drug was not as effective in people with more severe symptoms. “We’ve given Avigan to 70 to 80 people, but it doesn’t seem to work that well when the virus has already multiplied,” the source told the Mainichi Shimbun.

The same limitations had been identified in studies involving coronavirus patients using a combination of the HIV antiretrovirals lopinavir and ritonavir, the source added.

In 2016, the Japanese government supplied favipiravir as an emergency aid to counter the Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea.

Favipiravir would need government approval for full-scale use on Covid-19 patients, since it was originally intended to treat flu.

A health official told the Mainichi the drug could be approved as early as May. “But if the results of clinical research are delayed, approval could also be delayed.”

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Wednesday, March 18, 2020 12:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Don't anybody try to sign me up to be the guinea pig here.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 18, 2020 12:56 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

That's potentially very good news, since limitimg contact could only ever be a temporary measure seeing as it's an economically devastating tactic.

It's a remarkably simple chemical

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Favipiravir.svg

It was being developed for RNA viruses (retroviruses) like the coronaviruses and HIV.

Now that one drug has been found, others will follow as pharmas tweak the structure to try to break patent (unless fujifilm has erected a "thicket" of patents), or look more closely at similar drugs already in existence. If Fujifilm wants to make beaucoup bucks they will license production all over the world.

I wonder how many medicines were trialed in China? Did the Chinese allow American, Russian, European, and Indian drugs to be trialed? Seems like we would all benefit from knowing not only which ones worked, but which ones didn't. That would keep a lot of nations from going down rabbit holes that others had gone down already. A transparent report from China would be useful, but China isn't so much for transparency!

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Wednesday, March 18, 2020 1:41 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I've been thinking about the whole bio warfare thing. They'd be stupid to be working on SARS-COV-2 without either a vaccine, or treatment, or both, already in place. Well, maybe they were that stupid. But if they weren't, revealing either one or both would sort of blow the whole secret.

I think they at least have a vaccine. Maybe it's not the greatest. Maybe it takes more than 1 dose. Maybe it takes time for an effective immune response to build up. But yanno, why did Xi disappear for all those weeks? And then show up in a surgical mask which does diddly at filtering things out?

And just now, they're revealing a new effective drug.

Okay.

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