Tehran, Jul 1 As many as 19 people have been killed in an explosion and fire at a medical facility in Tehran.
A total of 19 people, including 15 men and 4 women, were killed in the explosion, the emergency services confirmed, RT reported citing KhabarOnline website.
According to a regional official, a gas leak caused the incident. Sputnik quoted a deputy head of Tehran police as saying to YJC news outlet that oxygen tanks exploded in the semi-basement of the clinic.
Islamabad, Jun 25: The coronavirus cases in Pakistan crossed the 192,000-mark after 4,044 new Covid-19 infections were detected in the last 24 hours, the health ministry said on Thursday.
According to the Ministry of National Health Services, 148 more people died due to the deadly virus in the country, taking the death toll to 3,903.
With the detection of 4,044 new cases in the last 24 hours, the coronavirus tally in the country now stands at 192,970, it said.
Sindh reported a maximum number of 74,070 infections, followed by 71,191 in Punjab, 23,887 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 11,710 in Islamabad, 9,817 in Balochistan, 1,365 in Gilgit-Baltistan and 930 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
A total of 81,307 patients have recovered so far from the disease.
Health authorities have so far conducted 1,171,976 coronavirus tests, including 21,835 in the last 24 hours.
Tehran, Mar 10: Twenty-seven people have died from methanol poisoning in Iran after rumours that drinking alcohol can help cure the novel coronavirus infection, state news agency IRNA reported on Monday. The outbreak of the virus in Islamic republic is one of the deadliest outside of China, where the disease originated.
Twenty have died in the southwestern province of Khuzestan and seven in the northern region of Alborz after consuming bootleg alcohol, IRNA said.
Drinking alcohol is banned in Iran for everyone except some non-Muslim religious minorities. Local media regularly report on lethal cases of poisoning caused by bootleg liquor.
A spokesman for Jundishapur medical university in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan, said 218 people had been hospitalised there after being poisoned.
The poisonings were caused by "rumours that drinking alcohol can be effective in treating coronavirus," Ali Ehsanpour said.
The deputy prosecutor of Alborz, Mohammad Aghayari, told IRNA the dead had drunk methanol after being "misled by content online, thinking they were fighting coronavirus and curing it." If ingested in large quantities, methanol can cause blindness, liver damage and death.
Iran has been scrambling to contain the spread of the COVID-19 illness which has hit all of the country's 31 provinces, killing 237 people and infecting 7,161.
According to IRNA, 16 out of 69 confirmed cases have died of coronavirus infection in Khuzestan as of Sunday.
Melbourne, Apr 10: Scientists have identified six drug candidates from more than 10,000 compounds that may help treat COVID-19.
The research, published in the journal Nature, tested the efficacy of approved drugs, drug candidates in clinical trials and other compounds.
"Currently there are no targeted therapeutics or effective treatment options for COVID-19," said Professor Luke Guddat from the University of Queensland in Australia.
"In order to rapidly discover lead compounds for clinical use, we initiated a programme of high-throughput drug screening, both in laboratories and also using the latest computer software to predict how different drugs bind to the virus," Guddat said.
The project targeted the main COVID-19 virus enzyme, known as the main protease or Mpro, which plays a pivotal role in mediating viral replication, the researchers said.
This makes it an attractive drug target for this virus, and as people don't naturally have this enzyme, compounds that target it are likely to have low toxicity, they said.
"We add the drugs directly to the enzyme or to cell cultures growing the virus and assess how much of each compound is required to stop the enzyme from working or to kill the virus. If the amount is small, then we have a promising compound for further studies," said Guddat.
After assaying thousands of drugs, researchers found of the six that appear to be effective in inhibiting the enzyme, one is of particular interest.
"We're particularly looking at several leads that have been subjected to clinical trials including for the prevention and treatment of various disorders such as cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, stroke, atherosclerosis and cancer," Guddat said.
Researchers said compounds that are already along the pipeline to drug discovery are preferred, as they can be further tested as antivirals at an accelerated rate compared to new drug leads that would have to go through this process from scratch.
"With continued and up-scaled efforts we are optimistic that new candidates can enter the COVID-19 drug discovery pipeline in the near future," Guddat said.
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