Our hospital has become the main Czech recipient and distributor of the experimental Japanese drug favipiravir. A delivery of Japanese medicine arrived at the hospital on Friday night. Physicians already have indication criteria for patients who could benefit from the drug. VFN has a total of one hundred packs of the drug in hundreds of tablets. Favipiravir will be further distributed to patients in need throughout the Czech Republic.

Treatment with the Japanese drug favipiravir was included in the program by the General Hospital on the basis of negotiations with the Ministry of Health and the State Institute for Drug Control (SÚKL). "I would like to take this opportunity to thank the State Institute for Drug Control. He took on all the legislative burden and helped immensely to get the medicine to us at all, including all the legal requirements. " said the director of VFN prof. MUDr. David Feltl, Ph.D., MBA.

The drug has already been successfully tested in Wuhan, China, and has proven itself in the early stages of COVID-19. In the Czech Republic, doctors want to administer it to patients with a moderate course of the disease. The distribution of medicines to other hospitals will take place on the basis of precisely defined legal contracts and conditions of the supplier. "We will allocate favipiravir based on the clinical needs of patients and how individual sites report. As for the indication criteria, patients who are not positive for too long could only benefit from the drug, they are only at the beginning of the disease. At the same time, they should have other serious life-threatening illnesses. " explained Jiří Votruba, head of the 1st Department of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases of the General Hospital and the 1st Medical Faculty of Charles University, which will be responsible for the redistribution of the drug itself.

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