Covid: a new antiviral could block its transmission

(ANSA) - ROME, DECEMBER 04 - A new antiviral drug could interrupt the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 virus which causes Covid-19. To say it is a study by the Georgia State University, which in a work published in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology have identified (on tests conducted on ferrets) this ability in the drug Mk-4482 / Eidd-2801 or Molnupiravir. "This is the first demonstration of an orally available drug that can rapidly block the transmission of Sars-CoV-2," said Richard Plemper, a lecturer who led the study. According to scholars, the treatment could potentially have a triple benefit: it would inhibit patients' progress towards severe disease, shorten the infectious phase to alleviate the emotional and socioeconomic cost of prolonged patient isolation, and rapidly reduce local epidemics. "We immediately noticed that Mk-4482 / Eidd-2801 has broad spectrum activity against respiratory RNA viruses and that oral treatment of infected animals with the drug reduces the amount of emitted viral particles of different orders of magnitude, drastically reducing transmission" , Plemper commented. "These properties - he added - have made him a powerful candidate for the pharmacological control of Covid-19". The researchers came to these conclusions with a ferret test. Sars-Cov-2 positive ferrets treated with the drug were placed in the same cage, both negative animals and none of them were infected. According to scholars, if these data were to translate successfully to humans, Covid-19 patients treated with the drug could become non-infectious within 24 hours of starting treatment. (HANDLE).