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CNN Health Dated: April 22, 2020 By: Elizabeth Cohen and Dr. Mitali Nigam Coronavirus patients taking hydroxychloroquine, a treatment touted by President Trump, were no less likely to need mechanical ventilation and had higher deaths rates compared to those who did not take the drug, according to a study of hundreds of patients at US Veterans Health Administration medical centers. The study, which reviewed veterans' medical charts, was posted Tuesday on medrxiv.org, a pre-print server, meaning it was not peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia. In the study of 368 patients, 97 patients who took hydroxychloroquine had a 27.8% death rate. The 158 patients who did not take the drug had an 11.4% death rate. "An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of a...

THE HINDU APRIL 01, 2020 A mixture of three quasi-subspecies of SARS-CoV-2 is in circulation in India, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said on Tuesday. These imported variants showed no differences from how they behaved in the place of origin. Scientists are yet to classify a SARS-Cov-2 variant as an Indian strain. R. Gangakhedkar, head of the ICMR’s Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases-I Division, said, “India’s COVID-19 cases were mainly from people with travel history and their immediate contacts, which is to say that this virus was brought in from outside. We are not seeing any variation from what is being seen on how this strain is behaving around the world. So there is no difference in its severity. However, in a large country like India, it’s difficult to predict an accurate trend about the progression of COVID-19 because we still don’t have enough time gap between the upswing of cases.” This, he explained, did not change India’s reporting, ...

HINDUSTAN TIMES MARCH 30, 2020 India’s top research organisations are taking the Covid-19 challenge head on, with the Indian Institute of Science, the National Institute of Immunology, and the Translational Health Science Technology Institute, among others, working on vaccine development and therapeutics. The National Institute of Immunology in Delhi will sequence the virus to see whether the one infecting travellers from different parts of the world is the same or has undergone changes. “The virus changes. By the time you may develop a vaccine it could have changed form. It’s important for us to understand how its changing. First is to see if people who have travelled from Italy, Germany, China, US, etc are infected with the same strain. That can happen through ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequencing. We saw such mutations during the H1N1 outbreak,” said Amulya K Panda, director, National Institute of Immunology (NII). NII is also studying what protein the virus is made up of -- so...

The Print Dinesh Singh, March 16, 2020 universities across the world — from Johns Hopkins to Harvard to Tsinghua University — are playing a proactive role in the battle against the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic. With research findings, general information and resource centres, universities are contributing to public good. But in India, there is a curious silence. What world universities are doing The interesting thing to note in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic is that much before it broke out, two biologists at the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland, in a detailed scientific study, had forewarned of the strong possibility of such an outbreak.   This is one of the important functions of a university. Another early instance of a very effective and vital response has been from the Peking University in China that worked in collaboration with the Pasteur Institute in Shanghai. In March 2020, they pro...

The Hindu C Maya, March 16, 2020 Several senior doctors, including the heads of several core departments, have now gone into forced self-isolation  Patient-care activities at Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) is on the verge of a shutdown after several senior doctors and an unknown number of health-care personnel and patients were exposed to the SARS CoV-2 from a doctor colleague of theirs who had returned from Spain and had been working amongst them. The said case had been officially declared as positive for COVID-19 by the Health Minister on Sunday evening, without divulging details. Several senior doctors, including the heads of several core departments, have now gone into forced self-isolation and have been left with no option but to abandon patient care, so that more people are not exposed to the COVID-19 threat. They have written to the Director of the institution to discharge patients waiting for surgery and other tre...

The Economist March 12, 2020 A s the number  of deaths among people infected by the new coronavirus mounts, it is tempting to divide that figure by the number of reported cases and conclude that the result is the fatality rate. Apply such maths to the world’s total of confirmed cases and deaths on March 11th and you get a fatality rate of 3.6%. But this figure, which epidemiologists call the “naive” case fatality rate, may be wrong in two different ways. First, many of the infections detected at this early stage of the epidemic are recent, so some will eventually result in deaths. That will push the fatality rate up. Second, many infections have not been spotted because testing for the virus has been patchy. Lots of mild cases of the disease have gone unnoticed. If all infections were actually counted, the result would be a bigger denominator. That would push the fatality rate down. As China began to trace infections more carefully, its fatality rate fell (see chart 1). ...

Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media. The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts may have originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse. Now, a respected epidemiologist who recent...

Newshub. August 26, 2018. Mosquitoes are some of the most deadly creatures on the planet. They carry viruses, bacteria and parasites, which they transmit through bites, infecting some 700 million people and killing more than 1 million each year. With international travel, migration and climate change, these infections are no longer confined to tropical and subtropical developing countries. Pathogens such as West Nile virus and Zika virus have caused significant outbreaks in the United States and its territories that are likely to continue, with new invasive pathogens being discovered all the time. Currently, control of these diseases is mostly limited to broad-spectrum insecticide sprays, which can harm both humans and non-target animals and insects. What if there was a way to control these devastating diseases without the environmental problems of widespread insecticide use? A study released in May 2017 suggests Zika began spreading in Florida mosquitoes about three mo...