Without a doubt, all human beings have a big problem with it. flu virus, a disease that can cause great harm to entire societies. Proof of what I say is, for example, in Spain, a country that has been greatly affected in recent weeks, especially in regions such as Aragon, La Rioja, Navarra, Catalonia and the Basque Country in recent weeks, always attending to the published report recently by the National Epidemiological Surveillance Network.
This has been the case due to the peculiar way flu vaccines are created every year. As a detail, tell you that, since it is impossible to wait to be affected to develop a vaccine, literally what is done is to study which strains may be more likely to affect us and from there develop the next year's vaccine. This finally translates into a kind of game of chance, if the researchers are right, the vaccine is tremendously effective, but it can happen like this year where the effectiveness of the vaccine has been lowered from 40-60% to 25%.
Why is a vaccine developed from one year to the next and not always the same one?
Whenever people talk about this type of virus, the truth is that this question arises, why is a vaccine for influenza that is totally effective not developed? This, without a doubt, would be the ideal, unfortunately the influenza virus has a high mutation capacity which causes the virus to change enough from one year to the next that the vaccines developed cannot affect it.
On the other hand, what is true and most remarkable about this whole process is that, despite the fact that year after year we must work to find a vaccine, many researchers dedicate all their efforts to develop a drug that is capable of curing this pathology. Tireless hours of research that, according to a paper that has been published from Japan, apparently may come to an end since a team of researchers from the country has managed to develop a medicine that can cure you of the disease in as little as 24 hours.
Japan has preliminary approved the use of a drug that promises to cure the flu in just 24 hours
This new drug has been created by the company Shionogi in collaboration with the Swiss multinational Roche. He himself has been baptized with the name of Baloxavir marboxil and it is nothing else, at least for now, than an experimental treatment whose use can be very effective in treating both type A and type B flu. As a detail, tell you that this drug, unlike many other treatments that exist on the market, it is just a pill that would be administered once orally.
As explained Daniel O'Day, Director of the Roche Pharmaceutical Department:
Baloxavir marboxil is a single-use pill compared to a multi-day course, which may provide some benefits for pandemic planning. You don't have the problem of potential resistance that could appear if you don't complete therapy.
To achieve such results, as has been explained, this drug blocks a protein that the virus needs to replicate inside host cells. Finally just tell you that Shionogi has already completed a phase III clinical trial to determine the efficacy of Baloxavir marboxil by comparing its use with that of a placebo and other alternatives. The result of the study concludes that patients who received Baloxavir marboxil took about 24 hours on average to recover versus the 42 hours it took for patients given the placebo. These results have led the Government of Japan to preliminarily approve the use of this experimental treatment.