AMCostaRica©
 
Sports News Lifestyle & Culture
Food & Good Eating
Tourism & Things To Do
Calendar
Real Estate Sales
Real Estate Rentals
Classified Ads

About Us











The donation is part of a $2,500,000 fund distributed equitably among five partner countries.
 - University of Costa Rica courtesy photo.







































Published Monday, August 17, 2020

$500k donation for producing
treatment against covid-19
in Costa Rica


By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

The Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) approved a donation of $500,000 for the Clodomiro Picado Research Institute of the University of Costa Rica, to increase the production of the treatment based on antibodies against covid-19.

CABEI headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has regional branches in six Central American countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.

According to CABEI, the donation is part of a $2,500,000 fund distributed equitably among five partner countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The money is to help aid each country in facing the emergency caused by the pandemic.

"Since the beginning of the health crisis in the region, CABEI has focused on assisting in different ways through the implementation of the Emergency Support and Preparedness Program for Covid-19 and the Economic Reactivation program," said Dante Mossi, president from the bank. "We are pleased to know that Costa Rica will use this new cooperation in clinical research that will allow it to fight covid-19."

This donation was made after the Costa Rican government began to seek funds to strengthen their treatment production, the institute said in its statement.

“Since we learned about the promising clinical advances and the impact that equine- plasma developed by the Clodomiro Picado Institute, we started into a conversation with the CABEI and requested their support,” President Carlos Alvarado said.

According to Alberto Alape-Girón, a researcher at the institute, the donation will produce the amount of medicine that the country needs and, eventually, supply other countries in Central American.

Last week, the first batch of covid-19 treatment made by Costa Rican scientists was delivered to Social Security. It was a lot of 80 units of treatment.

The medicine made with equine immunoglobulins could constitute an eventual treatment for patients with covid-19, announced the Social Security.

The next step is to carry out the clinical research phase that will be developed in the Specialized Center for the Care of Covid-19 Patients, known as the Covid Hospital, at the San Juan de Dios, Mexico and Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia hospitals, announced Román Macaya-Hayes, president of Social Security.

Social Security is currently developing guidelines to implement in hospitals that will participate in this next phase.

The goal is to give the patients a very strict follow-up that guarantees the evolution of the disease to try to confirm, with reliable statistical numbers, if the treatment developed by the scientists makes a favorable difference in the evolution of the disease.

It is estimated that in two weeks the treatment will be applied to patients.

In July, specialists from George Mason University, in Virginia, U.S.A., confirmed that the treatment developed by Costa Rican scientists is capable of inhibiting the infectivity of the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus, which produces the covid-19.

Costa Rican scientists sent samples of the treatment to George Mason to obtain an alternative result of the effectiveness of the treatment against covid-19 in cells.

George Mason University has one of the highest biosafety laboratories in the U.S. for testing live viruses in an environment with all the conditions of isolation and biosecurity. This allowed demonstrating that this plasma neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 and that it is 100 times more powerful than convalescent plasma obtained from humans, said the university in its statement.

"The results clearly demonstrate that the horses produced a large number of antibodies that block the entry of the virus into human cells," said Alberto Alape Girón, Ph.D., ICP-UCR researcher. "This indicates that the drug can be very efficient and that the amount that will be required to treat patients would be relatively low.”

According to Carlos Araya, Director of the Costa Rican University, the treatment developed at the institute is applied to people infected with covid-19 preventing them from getting worse.

Given the successful results in the analysis, both in Costa Rica and in the U.S., the human portion of the testing is meant to test its effectiveness.

The expectation is that the results match those expected by scientists. If successful, specialists hope to treat all hospitalized and infected patients sick with the virus in the country.

Time is running away for health authorities to find a cure for covid-19 while statistics have shown a speedy increase in newly infected cases as well as deaths due to the virus.

As of Sunday afternoon, the Ministry of Health provided the following statistics on the status of the virus in the country:

728 new covid-19 cases, bringing the total to 19,109 active cases. Which is a 67% active patients rate.The ages of patients infected range from a three-month-old baby to a 99-year-old person.

7,292 foreign-born people have been infected of the 28,465 cases since March, approximately 25% of the total cases.

• 380 patients are being treated in public hospitals, where 102 patients are in Intensive Care Units with delicate health conditions, 278 patients are in recovery rooms. Most of the infected patients are quarantined in their homes.

• 9,062 coronavirus patients have fully recovered, which is a 31,8% recovery rate.

• 78,235 people have been ruled out.

• 120,465 medical covid-19 tests have been made.

294 deaths of patients infected with covid-19 since March. Which is a 1% death rate. Of these 109 were women and 185 men. The ages range from 21 to a 100-year-old person.

Regarding the death of the youngest person related to covid-19, the authorities provided a brief statement about the patient.

She was a 21-year-old Costa Rican woman who lived in Guanacaste Province. She was hospitalized at Hospital México and was diagnosed with the virus on July 31. Prior to her infection, she already presented a severe medullary aplasia. This is a rare hematologic disorder characterized by pancytopenia occurring in association with hypocellularity or acellularity of the bone marrow in the absence of problems of cell maturation and malignant or fibrotic medullary invasion.

On July 30, authorities reported 30 foreign-born people had died from covid-19 since March, at the time it was 22% of virus-related deaths. However, the ministry confirmed that they will not continue providing information on the number of foreign-born people who die from covid-19 in the country.

Readers can see the updated number of total patients in each district at the National Distance Education University on its
Covid-19 Map.

As of Sunday night, the pandemic has killed 773,469
patients worldwide, according to recent statistics reported by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.




----------------------------
Should scientists speed-up the production of covid-19 treatment?
We would like to know your thoughts on this story. Send your comments to news@amcostarica.com




Facebook110217.jpg twitter110217.jpg
Subscribe110217.jpg