World Health Organization Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has welcomed the call by Costa Rica’s President, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, for WHO to launch an initiative that would “pool rights to technologies that are useful for the detection, prevention, control and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic.” “I welcome his initiative & call for pooled rights […] Continue reading ->
The US Food and Drug Administration granted investigational emergency use approval for convalescent blood plasma as a potential COVID-19 treatment on Tuesday.  Cloned antibodies from recovered COVID-19 patients showed impressive ability to neutralize SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the disease, in cell cultures, according to a paper published Wednesday on the preprint server BioRxiv. Two of […] Continue reading ->
Costa Rica’s president, Carlos Alvarado Quesada has appealed to Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, to “pool rights to technologies that are useful for the detection, prevention, control and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic”. The presidential letter dated Monday, 23 March, and co-signed by Minister of Health, Daniel Salas Peraza, […] Continue reading ->
US Food & Drug Administration authorization of a rapid COVID-19 test on the GeneXpert platform, one of the most widely-used TB diagnostic tools in the world, could be the first crack in the doorway to wider testing capacity in low- and middle-income countries, leading TB advocates told Health Policy Watch.  There are some 23,000 GeneXpert […] Continue reading ->
Manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE) for the COVID-19 pandemic response should be scaled up by 80 to 100 times to meet the projected needs of the healthcare workforce, the World Health Organization said on Friday. Amid a growing PPE shortage crisis in hotspots like Italy, the United States, and Iran, some 26 million healthcare […] Continue reading ->
New high-throughput test technologies that can process thousands of COVID-19 samples a day are coming online. But the CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals, which recently gained US Food and Drug Administration approval for a new high-volume test, asserted Thursday that “broad-based testing is simply not feasible.” Severin Schwan, Roche CEO, was speaking at a press conference […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization announced on Wednesday a global “SOLIDARITY Trial” to generate a large, robust study comparing potential treatments for COVID-19. Currently there are 522 trials listed on WHO’s Clinical Trial registry under “COVID-19.” “Multiple small trials with different methodologies may not give us the clear, strong evidence we need about which treatments help to […] Continue reading ->
A worldwide shortage of chemical reagents needed for COVID-19 testing has emerged, World Health Organization officials admitted on Wednesday – even as the number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide surpassed the 200,000 mark. Reports of shortages come days after WHO’s Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued an urgent appeal to countries […] Continue reading ->