By Bhanvi Satija<\/p>\n
LONDON, May 18 (Reuters) – Britain has received supplies of the antiviral drug favipiravir from Japan as part of its response to a deadly hantavirus \u200coutbreak linked to the Hondius cruise liner, the UK Health Security Agency said on \u200cMonday.<\/p>\n
UKHSA said it accepted delivery of the drug, which remains experimental for use to treat hantavirus, over the weekend \u200band that the supplies would bolster treatment stocks, even though the risk of wider transmission in the UK remained very low.<\/p>\n
Neither the UKHSA nor Japanese authorities disclosed details about the number of doses supplied to Britain.<\/p>\n
The luxury liner at the centre of the outbreak docked at the Dutch \u200cport of Rotterdam on Monday, where \u2060authorities disembarked crew members and medical staff. Three people have died from eight confirmed cases and two probable cases linked to the ship.<\/p>\n
There is \u2060no specific therapy for hantavirus, which is primarily spread by rodents but can be transmitted between people in rare cases and after prolonged, close contact.<\/p>\n
Treatment usually focuses on supportive care such as rest \u200band fluids, \u200bwhile some patients may need breathing support.<\/p>\n
In Japan, \u200bfavipiravir is sold under the brand \u200cname Avigan by a unit of Fujifilm as an emergency medication for novel or re-emerging flu. The drug, which works by blocking a key enzyme that many viruses need to multiply, is not licensed for use in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
Use of favipiravir in hantavirus would generally be considered experimental or compassionate rather than standard care, and most likely to treat severe infection early on, \u200csaid Piet Maes, a virologist at the University of \u200bBrussels.<\/p>\n
Maes said evidence so far comes only from lab \u200band animal studies, with no strong \u200bhuman trial data showing the drug works against hantavirus. There is no \u200cinternationally established clinical protocol recommending its routine \u200buse for hantavirus.<\/p>\n
The outbreak \u200binvolves the rarer type of hantavirus called the Andes virus, which is the only strain known to spread between people, though typically only after close and prolonged contact.<\/p>\n
World Health \u200bOrganization officials said they have \u200cnot identified changes that would make the virus more transmissible or severe, and \u200bthat the outbreak does not pose a pandemic threat.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Bhanvi Satija in \u200bLondon; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Neil Fullick)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Bhanvi Satija LONDON, May 18 (Reuters) – Britain has received supplies of the antiviral drug favipiravir from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[281152,7676,271924,281153,281154,97,3471,267960,137664],"class_list":["post-651784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-antiviral-drug","tag-britain","tag-deadly-hantavirus","tag-drug-works","tag-favipiravir","tag-health","tag-japan","tag-japanese-authorities","tag-uk-health-security-agency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}