The COVID-19 vaccine by Johnson & Johnson is on track to become the latest vaccine in the global fight against COVI-19. Today (Wednesday), the US FDA released its report on the vaccine and you can read the entire 62 pages below. FDA-Briefing-Document According to the document, in the study that involved about 40,000 participants, as of February 5, 2021, there were 7 COVID-19 related deaths in the study in the placebo group and no COVID-19-related
INOVIO (NASDAQ:INO), a biotechnology company focused on bringing to market precisely designed DNA medicines to treat and protect people from infectious diseases and cancer, today announced the first participant was dosed in a Phase 1B clinical trial for INO-4500, its DNA vaccine candidate for Lassa fever, in Ghana. The Phase 1B clinical trial (LSV-002), ongoing at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Accra, Ghana, is the first vaccine clinical trial for Lassa Fever to be conducted in West
As government officials in Nigeria continue to promise citizens that doses of COVID-19 vaccines will soon become available in the country, Ghana has become the first to receive COVID-19 vaccine on the continent through the Gavi and WHO-led COVAX platform. The vaccines arrived on a flight from Mumbai, via Dubai, where the flight also collected a shipment of syringes from a Gavi-funded stockpile at UNICEF’s regional Supply Hub. In a statement, COVAX today announced that 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine
Ebola vaccination of people at high risk kicked off today in Guinea as the emergency response was escalated to counter the spread of the virus that re-emerged in the country a little more than a week ago for the first time since 2016. The vaccination was launched in Gouecke, a rural community in N’Zerekore prefecture where the first cases were detected on 14 February. The Minister of Health and Public Hygiene of Guinea, General Remy Lamah, the United Nations Resident Coordinator,
Pooled testing for COVID-19 can maintain the accuracy of test results while reducing the use of testing resources by as much as 76%, according to two new studies of nasopharyngeal test samples. Widespread testing is critical to manage the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as it allows authorities to trace the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and implement effective mitigation measures. However, testing large populations with individual tests is resource-intensive, and breakdowns in supply chains and limitations on testing speeds have severely held back
The coronavirus pandemic, which took the world by surprise, exposed the underbelly of the health systems worldwide. Healthcare systems in advanced economies such as Italy, Spain, US, France, etc. were quickly overwhelmed as tens of millions of residents in these countries caught the virus leading to the death of millions. In the US, for instance, more than 27 million people had been infected as of 15 February, with close to half a million reported dead from the virus. Africa, particularly Nigeria,
A suite of tools to help countries improve diagnosis and treatment of cancer among children is being released today by the World Health Organization, on International Childhood Cancer Day. The package includes a “how-to” guide for policy-makers, cancer control programme managers and hospital managers; an assessment tool to inform implementation; and a multilingual online portal for information-sharing. The new tools will support countries with implementation of the CureAll approach, adopted by WHO’s Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer. The Initiative, launched in 2018,
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a “profound” impact on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer around the world, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, before highlighting that breast cancer has become the most common type of the disease. More than a year since the new coronavirus crisis began, its impact on cancer care has been stark, with “50 per cent of governments (having) cancer services partially or completely disrupted because of the pandemic”, said Dr. André Ilbawi, from WHO’s Department of
The Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today announced that a new case of Ebola has been detected in Butembo, a city in North Kivu Province, where a previous outbreak was declared over in June 2020. The Butembo branch of the National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB) confirmed Ebola in samples taken from a patient with Ebola-like symptoms who had sought treatment at a local health centre. The woman was the wife of an Ebola survivor.