Favipiravir already prescribed by health experts to treat flue in Japan
Chinese health authorities have confirmed that a Japanese manufactured medicine favipiravir showed positive result to treat the patients of Coronavirus. The medicine was developed by the Fujifilm Toyama Chemeical to treat the influenza.
Accordimg to Japanese media the medicine proved to be a proper medicine and treated the coronavirus patients in 4 days.
Zhang Xinmin, an official at China’s science and technology ministry, said that doctors have done clinical trial of this medicine on 340 patients.
Japan is already using Favipiravir to cure the new type of flue and satisfied with it’s result, claimed the Japanese media last week
“It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” Zhang said.
According to shared data by the health authority that Favipiravir prescribed to the patients of Coronavirus and it treated the positive patients in just four days, compared with median of 11 days who were not treated with this medicine, NHK claimed. The trials were conducted at Shenzen and patients declared negative.
X-rays data showed that the lung condition of the patients on Favipiravir were much better compared to other patients. Favipiravir cured patients’s lungs were 91 percent better to 62 percent without the drug.
However Japanese doctors have said that the medicine were used by them since 2014 to treat mild to severe cases of flue but it is as helpful with multiple ailments of Coronavirus.
Fujifilm Toyama Chemical, which developed the drug – also known as Avigan – in 2014, has declined to comment on the claims.
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.
Japanese government supplied Favipiravir to treat the Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea in 2016 as an emergency medicine.
Favipiravir is in the process to get approval of the government to use on Covid-19 patients at large scale as it was originally a medicine to treat the flue symptoms.
A health official told the the drug could be approved as early as May. “But if the results of clinical research are delayed, approval could also be delayed.”
