Faster, cheaper COVID-19 testing kit ready, says Kerala institute / Remdesivir: Covid-19 patients recovering quickly after getting experimental drug / French study finds hydroxychloroquine doesn't help patients with coronavirus

By Dilip -
Coronavirus (COVID-19): SCTIMST director Dr Asha Kishore said the kit reduces the confirmation time from the current 4-5 hours to two hours Coronavirus (COVID-19): DESCRIBING IT as an “important breakthrough”, doctors at Kerala’s Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) said Thursday that they have developed a diagnostic kit that halves the time currently taken to detect COVID-19. 

 SCTIMST director Dr Asha Kishore told The Indian Express that the kit, which reduces the confirmation time from the current 4-5 hours to two hours, was originally being developed for the detection of DNA of Mycobacterium TB over the past two years and was scheduled for clinical trials in March. Kishore said the new tool, called Chitra GeneLAMP-N, is more effective because it detects two transcripts of the N-gene of SARS COV2, or COVID-19....
https://indianexpress.com/article/coronavirus/faster-cheaper-covid-19-testing-kit-ready-says-kerala-institute-6366065/

 Remdesivir: Covid-19 patients recovering quickly after getting experimental drug
Covid-19 patients who are getting an experimental drug called remdesivir have been recovering quickly, with most going home in days, STAT News reported Thursday after it obtained a video of a conversation about the trial.  The patients taking part in a clinical trial of the drug have all had severe respiratory symptoms and fever, but were able to leave the hospital after less than a week of treatment, STAT quoted the doctor leading the trial as saying. "The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We've only had two patients perish," Dr. Kathleen Mullane, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago who is leading the clinical trial, said in the video...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/16/health/coronavirus-remdesivir-trial/index.html

 French study finds hydroxychloroquine doesn't help patients with coronavirus

A drug that's been touted by President Donald Trump as a "game changer" didn't help hospitalized patients with coronavirus and was associated with heart complications, according to a new study. "This provides evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not apparently treat patients with Covid 19," said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Even worse, there were side effects caused by the drug -- heart toxicities that required it be discontinued."...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/health/new-french-study-hydroxychloroquine/index.html


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