The Japanese media is reporting that a drug created in Japan to treat new strains of the flu has appeared to be effective in coronavirus patients in China.
Medical authorities have used the drug during a drug test in China reports The Guardian, and according to an official of China’s science and technology ministry, “it is clearly effective in treatment”.
The drug, known as favipiravir, developed as a subsidiary of Fujifilm, has produced encouraging results in clinical trials in Wuhan and Shenzhen. The trials included 340 patients.
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In Shenzhen, patients who were given the medicine, showed negative for the virus, four days after they had tested positive. This is in comparison to people who showed negative to the virus after 11 days of testing positive. X-rays also showed improvements in lung conditions in “about 91% of the patients who were treated” with the medication, “compared to 62% of those without the drug,” reported The Guardian.
Simultaneously, doctors in Japan were using the same drug in their studies on coronavirus patients with mild to moderate symptoms but their results suggested that it doesn’t work on people with more severe symptoms.
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The drug was first used in 2016 by the Japanese government as an emergency medication to counter the Ebola virus in Guinea. Since this drug was originally intended to treat the flu, it would need government approval for full use on coronavirus patients.
