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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved a smallpox drug – a disease that was eradicated nearly 40 years ago.
On July 13, the agency announced that she was approving Tpoxx, the first drug specifically against smallpox. Smallpox was eradicated from the world in the 1980s through vaccination efforts.
"To counteract the risk of bioterrorism, Congress has taken steps to allow the development and approval of countermeasures to counteract the pathogens that could be used as weapons," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the Commissioner of the FDA, said in a statement.
Smallpox has not been technically cleared from the planet the virus still exists in laboratories in the United States and Russia.
But some governments believe that there is a risk that the virus exists in other places than these laboratories and could be deliberately released to cause harm, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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For example, in 2014, a government scientist cleaned up an old man in a research center pr In Washington, smallpox bottles are found, which have been forgotten in a cardboard box.
Routine vaccination against smallpox stopped after 1980, very few people are vaccinated against the disease, which is very contagious. Nearly one-third of those affected, said the WHO
Illustrations of the Aztec suffering from the smallpox virus spread by the Spaniards
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And unlike measles and whooping cough, smallpox vaccines are too dangerous to be distributed to the general public, Dr. Peter J. Hotez, former President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute
. the 20th century before its eradication. Symptoms include fever, fatigue and pus-filled wounds.
First approved virus treatment
Tpoxxis is the first approved treatment for the virus.
The new drug for smallpox has been tested in animals infected with viruses closely related to the smallpox virus, the FDA said. It has not been tested on people infected with similar viruses.
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"More animals treated with TPOXX were living compared to animals treated with a placebo," the FDA said in its statement. , which allows the use of animal studies to support approval when it is not possible or ethical to conduct studies on the effectiveness of the drug in people. However, the drug has been tested for the safety of over 350 healthy people who did not have smallpox.
© 2018 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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