A Salvadoran Health Ministry worker shows a package of bottles of
HydroxyChloroquine pills to be distributed in hospitals in San Salvador
on April 21, 2020, amid the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak. PHOTO | YURI
CORTEZ | AFP
Kenya has joined the countries “repurposing” the banned
antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine for emergency use ahead of mass
testing for Covid-19.
The country has ordered a one-off
consignment of 379,000 tablets of the hydroxychloroquine from India
just three weeks after the Asian nation partially lifted a ban on the
export of the drug.
The deal follows last week’s
telephone conversation between Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary
(CS) Raychelle Omamo and India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam
Jaishankar.
“In keeping with excellent bilateral ties
and as a special gesture, India has allowed one-time export of
prohibited Hydroxychloroquine Sulphate USP 200 mg (379,000 tablets) to
Kenya to support Government of Kenya in its fight against Covid-19
pandemic,” said a communique from the Indian government.
In
early April, India partially lifted a ban on the exports of the malaria
drug after President Donald Trump sought supplies for the US, which has
topped the world’s Covid-19 casualties with more than a million
confirmed cases and more than 60,000 deaths. Kenya, which reported its
first case of Covid-19 on March 13, has reported 396 confirmed cases.
Hydroxychloroquine,
which has been approved for Covid-19 treatment in Jordan, the US,
France and China, has been tested and found to strengthen cells in the
respiratory tract where the coronavirus punctures and releases its
genetic material.
Laboratory findings published by medRxiv, an online server for
medical articles, show the alkaline-based Hydroxychloroquine protects
the cell from becoming acidic, an environment that enables coronaviruses
to multiply.
“The end result is the coronavirus is
bumped out of cells and cannot infect them. (How azithromycin
contributes to this process isn’t clear yet, but doctors suspect that it
may quell the worst respiratory symptoms of Covid-19 by reducing
inflammation caused by the viral infection in the lungs.),” it said.
On
Thursday, CS Omamo and her Indian counterpart confirmed the arrival of
the second tranche of essential drugs — HIV medicines worth $154 million
— in Nairobi, a gift to Kenya by the Government of India.
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