Professor Tarek Alam, Head of the Department of Medicine at Bangladesh Medical College Hospital (BMCH) in Dhaka, have witnessed astounding results applying anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin and antibiotic Doxycycline on patients who had admitted to the BMCH with coronavirus infection.
Within just four days, Dr Alam said he and his team successfully cured 60 patients of novel coronavirus with the combination of Ivermectin and Doxycycline at his hospital. Few patients who were facing breathing difficulties were given both the drugs. It did not cause any side-effects and cured the patients successfully.
Hearing about the astounding success of a Bangladeshi doctor in treating coronavirus infected patients successfully, India Today’s news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai on Wednesday talked to Dr Tarek Alam of Bangladesh Medical College Hospital in Dhaka from New Delhi news centre.
Dr Tarek Alam said he had a meeting with the Bangladesh health minister on Tuesday morning and he had given him ‘green signal’ go ahead with a large scale randomised trial with the combination of Ivermectin and Doxycycline on coronavirus infected patients.
He said, “We have found 100 per cent success after applying the medication to COVID-19 patients at hospitals and their relatives at home quarantines.”
Doctors across the world at the moment are looking for combination of drugs that can treat the coronavirus patients till the development of a vaccine.
Dr Alam said they needed randomised controlled trial before suggesting that the combination of drugs could be widely used to treat coronavirus infected patients.
Asked whether he was confident that the combination of drugs could be widely used within a month, Dr Alam said, “I’m reasonably confident that within a month we will have this combination of drugs.”
When asked if the combination of drugs could be applied to patients with both mild and critical conditions, he said three patients were in critical state and they did not want to go to the government hospitals and they wanted to be treated with this combination of medication here at the BMCH and they improved. Other patients were asymptomatic and with mild symptoms, and they also got improved.
Knowing about the success of Dr Alam and his team in treating coronavirus patients, Dr Aarti Lal Chandani, Principal of Kanpur Medical College of India, told Zee Media that ‘Ivermectin is a drug that is part of the World Health Organization’s deworming programme, and is considered safe in the WHO’s Safety List. It is used as a de-worming tablet.”
According to health expert Dr Kaushal Kant Mishra, studies conducted at Monash University Australia and the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Lab found that Ivermectin eradicated the coronavirus within 48 hours. The study also found that the use of the drug also weakened the RNA of coronavirus by almost 93 per cent.
Doctors and scientists from across the world are striving hard to find medicine for coronavirus. Currently, over 100 research teams are busy in researches against this deadly virus. Some vaccine companies have also achieved initial lead but they will take at least two years to achieve the final success.
Even if scientists are able to make a vaccine for coronavirus in the next few months, it will take a lot of time to reach 750 crore people of the world. In such a situation, doctors around the world are trying a few already available medicines on COVID-19 patients and some of these drugs have shown results.
Doctors of a private hospital in Bangladesh gave Ivermectin as well as an antibiotic drug Doxycycline to 60 coronavirus patients and after 72 hours, they found that all the patients were COVID-19 negative, Dr Mishra said.
Ivermectin is considered an antimicrobial drug to increase immunity. If it proves effective in the treatment of coronavirus, it would certainly become a miracle drug, but for that a major trial is needed. Above all, the drug has shown a ray of hope to the global medical fraternity in the fight against the deadly virus.
