Word: ribavirin
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...medical centers around the country are testing another antiviral preparation, called Suramin, which was originally used to combat African sleeping sickness. Like HPA-23, the drug appears to stop the proliferation of the AIDS virus, but it does not necessarily improve the patient's condition. Other antiviral substances, including Ribavirin and Foscarnet, now being studied in Sweden and Canada, are in even earlier stages of investigation...
...first step on the road to defeating the disease had been taken. A little more than a month later, however, little has changed for SARS patients in Asian hospital wards and ICUs. Diagnostic tests are still slow or unreliable. Treatment for the disease?a combination of steroids and ribavirin?hasn?t proved very effective and has barely been modified since the early weeks of the outbreak. The best tools for stopping SARS are still face masks, fever checks and quarantine?19th century medicine for a 21st century disease...
...Peptides and protease inhibitors won?t help the victims of the current SARS outbreak, who?ll have to make do with ribavirin and steroids. But with all 29,700 or so nucleotides of the SARS genome already available for every researcher in the world to see and analyze, useful treatments should come quicker than ever before...
...Compounding the problem, doctors still haven't come up with a verifiably effective treatment anywhere. In Hong Kong, clinicians are continuing to use the antiviral drug ribavirin, though tests in the U.S. have shown that it doesn't kill the coronavirus. Several kinds of vaccines are already in the works, but private companies are hesitant to spend money on a virus that could disappear soon. That means most of the research is left to the cash-strapped public sector, and progress is slow. Even the most optimistic researchers believe a vaccine will take two years to develop?assuming the virus...
...Ribavirin's side effects, which include anemia, become dangerous at prolonged high dosages. Moreover, laboratory tests in the U.S. suggest that ribavirin may actually do nothing to the coronavirus. Scientists are exploring other antivirals?such as interferon, which boosts the immune system?or even HIV drugs?such as protease inhibitors, which block an enzyme the virus needs to replicate. But too little is known about the coronavirus to predict the effectiveness of these other drugs...