On the afternoon of February 17, the State Council held a press conference on the joint prevention and control mechanism to deal with the new coronavirus infection pneumonia epidemic, introducing the progress of medical treatment. Sun Yanrong, deputy director of Biological Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology, introduced the efficacy of a 70-year-old antimalarial drug in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia at the conference. Based on the urgent needs of the current clinical treatment, the experts unanimously recommended that chloroquine phosphate should be rapidly incorporated into the new version of the diagnosis and treatment program to expand the clinical scope. According to Sun Yanrong, chloroquine phosphate is an antimalarial drug that has been used in the clinic for more than seventy years. Previous studies have very clearly suggested that it not only has an antimalarial effect, but also has a broad-spectrum antiviral effect, in addition, it also has a very good immunomodulatory effect. “We organized a dozen hospitals in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hunan provinces to jointly carry out an evaluation on the safety and effectiveness of chloroquine phosphate for the treatment of neocoronaryngitis.” Sun Yanrong said, in the clinical very sure to see the efficacy, whether it is from the rate of reanimation, fever phenomenon or lung imaging time to improve, viral nucleic acid turn-around time and turn-around rate, shorten the duration of the disease a series of indicators for systematic and comprehensive research and judgment, can be clear and everyone said, with the drug group is better than the control group. Sun Yanrong said, for example, a patient in Beijing, 54 years old, onset of the fourth day of hospitalization, successfully entered the trial of chloroquine phosphate. One week after taking the drug, the patient’s nucleic acid turned negative, all the indicators all to the good, reached the standard of lifting the isolation and discharge. In addition, in terms of the safety of the drug, in more than one hundred cases of patients using the drug so far, no drug-related serious adverse reactions have been found. According to Sun Yanrong, February 15, by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Drug Administration and other major units jointly organized a video expert meeting in Beijing, led by academician Zhong Nanshan, a number of clinical research experts to participate in the expert argumentation, and jointly study and judge the efficacy of chloroquine phosphate for the new coronary pneumonia. The expert group reached a unanimous opinion after a serious and detailed discussion, and agreed that the drug is an old drug listed for many years, and the safety of its use in the treatment of a wide range of people is controllable. Based on the results of the studies conducted in the previous clinical period, it can be clear that chloroquine phosphate has efficacy in the treatment of neocoronaryngitis. Source: Surfing News