CORONAVIRUS DISEASE AS GLOBAL NIGHTMARE AND SEARCH FOR EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OPTIONS AND THE AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

Description

The corona virus disease as emerging pandemics, appears as global nightmare and a shock to global health system, affecting almost every part of the world and cut across all age groups, but appears to be more serious on certain categories of people (the elderly, the young and those with underline disease conditions like diabetes, heart and liver diseases among others). Spread of the disease in Africa, accord ing to WHO, global burden was over seven million cases including that of more than 30 affected African countries by June 7,th 2020, with South Africa having the highest burden (over 54,000 cases) and Egypt had (over 38,000 cases) as the second most affected country. Activity of many antimicrobial agents, such as: Antiviral, some antibacterial/antiparasitic and anti-inflammatory agents were being evaluated to explore their efficacy in combating the SARS-CoV-2 based on data in March, 2020. Moreover, at then, WHO launched a large scale global trial, named the “Solidarity Trial” which included thousands of patients from different nations to evaluate the efficacy of what WHO refers to, at that time, as the four most promising therapies on Covid-19: Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine; remdesivir, Lopinavir/Ritonavir (LPV/r) and LPV/r plus interferon-beta, which are primarily: Malaria drugs, an experimental antiviral drug; HIV drug combination and an immunomodulator respectively, the details of which could be found in the book.