₦airaland Forum

Sonoyom:
oooo

SirWarlock:
I don't understand, remdesivir doesn't work again?

SirWarlock:
I don't understand, remdesivir doesn't work again?

By Michelle Roberts
Health editor, BBC News online
A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus.
The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say.
The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.
It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth.
Had the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the pandemic, up to 5,000 lives could have been saved, researchers say.
And it could be of huge benefit in poorer countries with high numbers of Covid-19 patients.
Latest coronavirus updates
About 19 out of 20 patients with coronavirus recover without being admitted to hospital.
Of those who are admitted, most also recover but some may need oxygen or mechanical ventilation.
And these are the high-risk patients dexamethasone appears to help.
The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions.
And it appears to help stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.
This over-reaction, a cytokine storm, can be deadly.
In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, about 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and compared with more than 4,000 who were not.
For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%.
For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.
Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."
Lead researcher Prof Martin Landray said the findings suggested one life could be saved for:
every eight patients on a ventilator
every 20-25 treated with oxygen
"There is a clear, clear benefit," he said.
"The treatment is up to 10 days of dexamethasone and it costs about £5 per patient.
"So essentially it costs £35 to save a life.
"This is a drug that is globally available."
When appropriate, hospital patients should now be given it without delay, Prof Landray said.
But people should not go out and buy it to take at home.
Dexamethasone does not appear to help people with milder symptoms of coronavirus who do not need help with their breathing.
The Recovery Trial, running since March, also looked at the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which has subsequently been ditched amid concerns it increases fatalities and heart problems.
The antiviral drug remdesivir, meanwhile, which appears to shorten recovery time for people with coronavirus, is already being made available on the NHS .
The first drug proven to cut deaths from Covid-19 is not some new, expensive medicine but an old, cheap-as-chips steroid.
That is something to celebrate because it means patients across the world could benefit immediately.
And that is why the top-line results of this trial have been rushed out - because the implications are so huge globally.
Dexamethasone has been used since the early 1960s to treat a wide range of conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.
Half of all Covid patients who require a ventilator do not survive, so cutting that risk by a third would have a huge impact.
The drug is given intravenously in intensive care and in tablet form for less seriously ill patients.
So far, the only other drug proven to benefit Covid patients is remdesivir, which has been used for Ebola.
That has been shown to reduce the duration of coronavirus symptoms from 15 days to 11.
But the evidence was not strong enough to show whether it reduced mortality.
Unlike dexamethasone, remdesivir is a new drug with limited supplies and a price has yet to be announced.

AntiChristian:
Are you trying to explain the Bible verses or writing your own statement? All is just muddled up!

By Christine Ro 11th June 2020
Recent visitors have left mounds of rubbish at public spaces and beauty spots across the UK and beyond. What’s driving this behaviour?
“We fear a littering epidemic as lockdown eases” , warns the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. And indeed, Brits have embraced the opportunity to throng beaches and beauty spots in recent days. Images of the mounds of rubbish left in their wake have made headlines, sparked outrage and resulted in pleas by local government officials for visitors to stay away.
Research suggests that littering can be challenging to eradicate in the best of times – and these clearly aren’t the best of times. So what is it about current circumstances that’s driving this surge, and is there anything we can do to contain the problem?
The Covid-19 effect
In general, people justify littering by saying that bins are overflowing or too far away – although others believe the root cause is laziness or ignorance. In places where governments can’t afford to pay for rubbish collection, like informal settlements in Maputo, Mozambique , literal walls of rubbish can result.
Like every other aspect of our everyday lives, rubbish and recycling collection has been disrupted in some places by the Covid-19 pandemic. This context is crucial because waste disposal depends on “social proof”, or the copying of others’ behaviour. “If you see a place that’s full of litter and a mess, you’re more likely to think that it doesn’t matter,” says coaching psychologist Stephen Palmer of the International Academy for Professional Development and University of Wales Trinity Saint David. “If you actually see someone dropping litter, you’re probably more likely to drop litter yourself.”
Rubbish collectors in Paris in April. Some experts think the pandemic's intense psychological effects cause people to care less about littering (Credit: Getty Images)
There’s a large body of research backing up this point. It partly explains why littering has been reported to be more common among
young people and people with a weaker attachment to their communities. For these people, feeling part of a small group is especially important, and one way to express that is through defiance of broader norms. And it’s especially awkward to hold onto an empty can for the recycling bin if mates have already thrown theirs to the ground.
The pandemic may also be having a psychological effect. It’s natural that caring for the environment isn’t top of mind right now, says Palmer. “Certainly, when people are stressed or distressed, they go into more all-or-nothing thinking.” This can be useful for dealing with high-risk situations, but the upshot is that “the last thing on your mind is things like litter”. And the people who are the quickest to head for the beach may not be the most cautious of people overall.
More picnics, more disposable goods
Lockdown rules have also transformed the way people socialise, which affects the rubbish they produce. Chris Coode is the deputy chief executive of Thames21, a charity that works with volunteers to maintain healthy waterways in London, for instance through litter clean-ups and monitoring. Instead of meeting friends in pubs, restaurants and homes, Coode points out that now “you’re getting people using the parks and open spaces in ways that they hadn’t before…and in a sense haven’t got the rhythm of the way that new socialising is like”. He believes that people aren’t necessarily being wilful or malicious when they discard pizza boxes and plastic cups in public, but are “using these spaces in ways they haven’t before, and not thinking through the repercussions of their behaviour”.
Rubbish in Odessa Oblast, Ukraine in April. Litter like face masks, rubber gloves and hand sanitiser containers are common in the Covid-19 era (Credit: Getty Images)
It’s not only when or where people are littering that has shifted, but also
what they’re littering. Gloves and masks are being chucked on the streets in Canada and in Wales , raising concerns that this could be an infection hazard in addition to being an environmental hazard.
Shadi Moqbel has also seen more PPE waste in Jordan. Moqbel, a civil engineer at the University of Jordan who researches waste, explains that some of the patterns we’re seeing with the Covid-19 pandemic aren’t new. “As a result of the pandemic, people tend to move towards using disposable items rather than regular reusable items. They don’t want to get sick from using or touching something that might be used by others… We have seen it in previous outbreaks”, such as H1N1 (swine flu). Then as well as now, people used more disposable plates and packaging material. And the closure of restaurants during the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a rise in food delivery and takeaway meals – which
has meant more plastic packaging refuse.
Structural factors, short-term solutions
This is acute now because of the pandemic, but part of a larger historical trend towards disposability. Coode reports that along the Thames River in London, “the majority of the rubbish we’re finding is single-use plastic waste”. Likewise, in rural England, the main types of litter are fast-food packaging, confectionery wrappers and drinks bottles. Yet the move towards these types of portable, discardable packaging has been driven by manufacturers, who since World War Two have found it more profitable to produce single-use products compared to, for instance, the glass bottles that were previously used again and again.
Thus, some environmentalists argue that individual litterers aren’t the problem , and the system of disposability needs to be tackled at its root. But it will be very challenging to move away from lightweight plastic packaging, and the alternatives will have their own environmental trade-offs . Glass bottles require more energy to transport, for instance, and plastic wrap can help reduce food waste.
Building a culture of waste awareness also takes sustained governmental action, which has helped turn Taipei, Taiwan from a “garbage island” to a remarkably clean city. Paradoxically, this involved a reduction of public bins, and more focus on other forms of rubbish collection and disposal.
In the short term, however, that doesn’t help those of us whose blood begins to boil when we see cigarette butts and Styrofoam containers piled up next to an empty rubbish bin.
Cities have trialled a huge range of measures to reduce littering in the shorter term. As social marketer Yara Almosa and her colleagues at Australia’s Griffith University have enumerated , these range from eyes painted at eye level on walls (to give the impression that litterers are being watched) to fines, labels on disposable items, the wafting of pleasant scents, verbal appeals, information about how common littering is and special rubbish bins that are attention-grabbing or fun to use. One of the most effective tools is also the simplest: good old-fashioned social disapproval . So tsk-tsking, especially from a person in the same peer group as the litterer, can actually have an effect. Because we’re such social creatures when it comes to activities like littering, it’s useful to model responsible environmental behaviours.
Yet Thames21’s Coode calls for more understanding, especially during this difficult time. “You only see what’s left behind, you don’t see what’s taken away. It’s easy to be outraged,” he says, but “we are in a period of transition. It’s an effort for everybody to help. Some people need more help.”
But as coaching psychologist Palmer points out, in a world full of uncertainty, contributing to local cleanliness is an easy win: “At least litter is one thing we can all do something about.”

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AntiChristian:
No worry, I never get your time.

AntiChristian:
1. Now bring out the verses for tithe in the new testament.

You may as well explain the reason Jesus did speak figuratively from below:

John 16:25
"Though I have been speaking figuratively (paroimia), a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father.

Why wasn't Jesus speaking in a normal and clear way all the time? Why did Jesus then go and say that he won't 'use this kind of language'?

Well, here we find out why...

Mark 4:10-12
When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. 11He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12so that," 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'

So here we see that Jesus was deceiving certain people by speaking in parables so that they won't (and God forbid!) REPENT AND BE FORGIVEN!

Also in...

2 Thessalonians 2:11
For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.

So God will delude people so that they can believe lies?

AntiChristian:
See hypocrisy! You can't answer the Taqiyah in your Bible which is the topic of this thread and you want me to answer about stones which is out of the thread.

Permit me to label you a full hypocrite!

The topic of the thread is Taqiyah. And I have explain the Islamic perspective. You should explain the verses of the Bible that promotes lies and deceit in the Bible.

AntiChristian:
[b]Case not closed yet. You shouldn't be one sided here. In all fairness you should justify the verse below. I hope you won't be an hypocrite now!

sagenaija:
This thread is more about Kabah stones than the Bible issues you are trying to bring up.

The Koran condemned the idolators for taking stones as objects of veneration and worship.

Yet Mohamed kissed the black stone in the Kabah to the dismay of even his companions.

Today Moslems do the same because of what Mohamed did. And ALL these in direct contradiction to what the Koran says.

Here again is an example of what we say about the contradictions in Islam and how Islam speaks from both sides of the mouth.

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