By Francis Ogwo
The devastating effect of the deadly corona virus has left the whole world literally on its toes towards finding a vaccine and on the long run a lasting end.
The academia with it’s wide range of scholars have made the laboratories their bedrooms all in a bid to achieving this feat.
In what seems like a sigh of relief and a step closer to the end of covid 19, a combined team of researchers from the Peter Doherty Institute and Monash University in Australia have announced that they have made a discovery of an anti parasitic vaccine drug that can kill virus within 48 hours.
In an interview with 7 news.co.au, an Australian television platform, Professor Kylie Wagstaff of the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute spoke on the efficacy of Ivermectin which is a treatment for lice
Excerpts
Q: How was this discovered?
A: We had Ivermectin medicine for about 10 years now at Monash.We found that it worked in different viruses in the lab .So once we had access to covid 19 causative virus ,we were able to test wether Ivermectin also worked on it
Q: What’s the drug and what was it normally used for?
A: Ivermectin is an important drug.Its been around for about 30 years and is used around the world to treat a number of parasites largely worms.
Q: Do you think it would work in humans?
A: It really works well inside the cell culture .I really have to say that cells in a dish is not the same as the virus in a human,so that is to say wether the dosages we know are safe to be given to people are they are able to work on them.
Q: How did you come up with th idea of using a lice treatment for covid 19?
A: We didn’t actually think about it in nice terms.What we did was a screening of compounds that might work against a range of viruses and Ivermectin came up because it actually works against one of our mechanisms and means it would be able to work against a wide range of viruses .So we hypothesized that covid 19 might be using the same mechanisms and so this might work
Q: When should we expect to see this drug administered to people?
A: It is really hard for us to say at this stage.There are a number of critical tests we need to carry out.What are the safe dosages we can use in humans and how much that affects humans?
