Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophic health challenge widely spreading all over the world, caused by coronavirus “SARS-CoV-2” infections. It has been started for more than one year ago; and panic and fear are still dominated among people because of the ease with which infection spread among communities, as well as the high morbidity and mortality. Many preventive measures have been taken to prevent its spread, including physical body distancing, wearing face masks, etc. Unfortunately, the frequent mutations of the virus have made it a resistant to usual measures such as use of convalescent plasma from patients cured from infections. Several vaccines have been developed and administered as an urgent measure to combat the infection. Such vaccines could be not available for all countries especially that of low- and middle income. Moreover, the time for development of an approved vaccine in the normal situations that might reach about 10 - 15 years, is not available for vaccines used in the current pandemic. On the other hand, ivermectin, a drug approved by FDA as a broad-spectrum antiparasitic drug, has been clinically tried in prophylaxis of COVID-19 patients’ contacts and proved high efficacy. It is a safe and effective drug and has given tremendous results in protection against acquiring COVID-19 infection in all studies. Therefore, we suggest that ivermectin could be used for mass chemoprophylaxis without mentioned risks on populations. This measure might assist in combating the current COVID-19 outbreaks.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus Infection; Current Pandemic; Ivermectin; SARS-CoV-2

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Citation

Citation: Hegazy., et al. “Mass Chemoprophylaxis with Ivermectin against COVID-19 Pandemic: Review and Authors’ Perspective”.Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 5.6 (2021): 47-51.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Hegazy., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.