A medical worker talks to a patient at a coronavirus testing unit in Pretoria.
Photographer: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg
Photographer: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg
South African authorities have approved the use of a drug used to control parasites in humans and animals to treat coronavirus patients.
The drug, known as ivermectin, will be allowed for compassionate use in a controlled access program, South Africa’s head of the health regulator said on Wednesday. Doctors applying to the regulatory authority to use the medicinal product will be considered on a case-by-case basis, Said Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela.
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Ivermectin has been used for decades to treat animals infested with parasitic worms, while in humans it is used as a local ointment for diseases, including skin infections and inflammation. The World Health Organization has suggested that the drug has encouraging effects on coronavirus, although, like other regulators, it is said that the drug has not been properly evaluated.
The drug will not be limited to patients with known co-morbidities of Covid-19, Semete-Makokotlela said.
The regulator is already seeing widespread use of ivermectin in an emerging black market as South Africa faces a second wave of coronavirus infections that has resulted in in hospital increasing admissions and a deficit of critical care beds. Allowing the controlled use of the medicine will help the regulatory body to monitor its use and will allow the body to collect much needed safety data.
“Despair”
“We absolutely share everyone’s despair right now,” said Helen Rees, chairwoman of the regulator. So the question of ivermectin and self-medication goes back to what everyone in the scientific community is saying. And I mean, we don’t know if it works and we don’t know if it doesn’t work. That’s why we need to get data. ”
Authorities in neighboring Zimbabwe have also approved the use of ivermectin to treat coronavirus patients, after doctors appealed to the Ministry of Health to reverse a previous ban on imports and use of the drug. Doctors in Zimbabwe are using ivermectin in a nanosilver solution – which is used as an algaecide – and have found the combination “game changer,” the College of Primary Care Physicians said in a letter to the ministry.
Rees warned South Africans that people who self-medicate “should be very careful, because we have no information about the quality of what you take.”
Clear guidelines on launching the controlled access program will be given in the next two days, Semete-Makokotlela said. There are also plans to conduct large-scale clinical trials, she said.
This is not the first time that authorization has been granted for the use of promising Covid-19 treatments and medicines with only initial evidence. Several drugs that were eliminated last year for treatment failed to reproduce the initial benefits once examined in large clinical trials.
Semete-Makokotlela also said that the regulator granted the health department permission to distribute the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford, the first for Covid-19 vaccinations. It is also reviewing applications from rival manufacturers Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer Inc., but has not yet received a request from Moderna Inc., she said.
The South African authority also held talks before filing with “many other” vaccine manufacturers, including China and Russia, Semete-Makokotlela said.
– With the assistance of Desmond Kumbuka
(Updates with Zimbabwe approving drug use in the second paragraph after the subheading Desperation)