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“We are dealing with an exploitation of ignorance and poor health literacy, as was done when AIDS appeared in Africa 30 years ago,” former president of the Order of Pharmacists and the first president of Infarmed, Aranda, told Lusa. da Silva.
“Covid-Organics” is a drink made from mugwort, a plant discovered by the Chinese that is used to treat malaria, and herbs from Madagascar, a country where the flora has 12,000 plant species.
Madagascar has reported 149 cases of covid-19, with no record of deaths, since the start of the pandemic, with 99 patients reported as recovered.
Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina drank and praised the alleged curative and preventive virtues of this product against covid-19, which is being administered to the population and which has already been exported to at least Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Niger and Tanzania
Artemisia is also one of four products that make up a traditional herbal syrup that the president of the São Tomé and Príncipe Association of Traditional Medicine recently announced that it has medicinal capabilities against the symptoms of covid-19.
Queguê, mugwort, okra and quina are the components of this syrup with supposed antiviral capabilities, against malaria, bronchitis, cough, headaches and other ailments.
Specialist in the pharmaceutical industry, hospital pharmacy and pharmaceutical registration and regulation, Aranda da Silva warns about the “serious consequences for public health” and the creation of “false expectations, which induce the use of substances whose efficacy and safety have not been proven “
The World Health Organization (WHO), he recalled, has already commented on this matter, affirming that there is no evidence of a cure for covid-19 and advising people not to self-medicate.
“There are no shortcuts,” said WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
For its part, the African Union (AU) has announced that it intends to obtain technical data on the safety and efficacy of “Covid-Organics” and that it has been holding discussions with Madagascar in this regard.
The pharmacology specialist António Vaz Carneiro, who heads the Center for the Study of Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBE) at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, told Lusa that in times of pandemic, such as that of covid -19, there are always “the most incredible and fantastic things” that are later ineffective.
“This creates cruel hope for the sick,” said the doctor.
For António Vaz Carneiro, regardless of the agent to fight and the urgency that a pandemic requires, “the scientific, technical and ethical principles must always be applied”.
This requires clinical trials, the only ones that guarantee an effective study of the benefits and risks of any intervention, be it drugs or surgery.
“All interventions have risks. It is important to assess the risk, to assess the various factors, namely the effects of toxicity, “he said.
With regard to “Covid-Organics”, António Vaz Carneiro emphasizes: “Whatever the composition of the tea, the methodologies must be the same”.
And remember that, right now, people always seem to announce “an amazing set of things.”
“There have been examples in the medical record of products that have killed patients,” he said, stressing: “Patients who are made available [para os ensaios clínicos] they are the heroes of this whole story and they deserve our consideration. ”
The testing of these products always begins in the animal model, then in the first clinical phase in humans without disease, then with some disease, and finally in thousands of patients with that disease.
Currently, there are no licensed drugs for the treatment of covid-19, but only a few molecules that are identified as potential therapeutic candidates.
This is “drug replacement”, in the context of which the therapeutic potential against covid-19 of various drugs, such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, licensed drugs for malaria, arthritis and lupus, is being evaluated.
The combination of lopinavir / ritonavir (licensed for HIV treatment) is also being tested.
Remdesivir, a drug developed against the Ebola virus, is considered one of the most promising molecules in the treatment of the new coronavirus, due to its broad antiviral spectrum.
António Vaz Carneiro identifies a link between poverty and this type of “miracle” cure advertisement.
“In those countries, where there are no health systems like ours, structured, evaluated, administered, what happens is that there is a great difference in treatment,” he said.
And he continues saying: “We don’t even know how many infected people there are in those countries, because then what kills is malaria, tuberculosis, and nobody seems interested in finding drugs that treat malaria because it attacks poor countries more.”
Malaria kills a child every two minutes. “For the population affected by diseases with this lethality, the ‘crown’ will not even be something very serious …”.
And he remembered that this temptation of medicinal herbs is ancient.
“Teas have always existed. For centuries they were what existed, since synthetic medicines only appeared in the 19th century ”, he recalled.
In fact, the first drugs were plants, but since their active substances were very limited, they began to be chemically synthesized. The next step was biological drugs, created in living cell lines and currently under investigation.
