Treatments: those that have worked and those that have not
Date: Wednesday, 14 October 2020
Time: 6:30pm AEDST
Chair:
Dr Peter Eizenberg is the Director of ‘Doctors of Ivanhoe’ and a GP with 30+ year’s experience with special interest in Immunisation. Current member of Advisory Committees for the Immunisation Coalition and AusVaxSafety. Former member of NIC, ACIR Management and other national immunisation committees and Executive Director NEVDGP.
Presenters:
Gary Grohmann is a virologist and a former Director of Immunobiology (a WHO Essential Regulatory Laboratory) at the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia (1997- 2015), responsible for vaccine testing and registration. During this time he also represented the TGA on various WHO committees involving influenza issues. He then undertook a number of engagements with WHO (2015-2018) in Geneva with the Health Systems and Innovation Group (working with the Technology Transfer Initiative assisting developing vaccine manufacturers and the WHO Research blueprint), the Global Action Plan (GAP) for Influenza Vaccines, the Essential Medicines Programme (Reviewing Biocontainment); the Global Influenza Programme (Vaccine strain selection committee and the “Switch” meetings); and the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework Review Group Secretariat (lead).
Associate Professor Steven Tong is an infectious diseases physician with the Victorian Infectious Diseases Service and Co-Head of the Translational and Clinical Research and Indigenous Health cross-cutting disciplines at the Doherty Institute. He spent 10 years in Darwin before moving to Melbourne to join the Doherty Institute in 2016. His research interests include skin pathogens (Staphylococcus aureus, Group A Streptococcus), hospital infections, Indigenous health, viral hepatitis and influenza. His passion is to apply cutting edge science to address clinically driven questions. Steven trained in infectious diseases in Melbourne (2004-2005) and Darwin (2006) and was awarded a PhD from the Menzies School of Health Research/Charles Darwin University in 2010. His post-doctoral training took him to Duke University, North Carolina (2011) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge in the UK (2012). Key achievements from his research include the discovery and naming of two new species of Staphylococcus, discovery of a novel genotype of hepatitis B in Indigenous Australians, and the conduct of clinical trials for the treatment of impetigo and MRSA bloodstream infections.
Learning outcomes:
a. Medications (including current status of evaluation of effectiveness and safety)
- Agents that can be used to prevent COVID eg hydroxychloroquine, BCG
- Agents that can be used to treat COVID eg remdesivir, ivermectin,
- Agents that can be used to reduce complications of COVID eg dexamethasone, mesoblasts
b. Agents which have been shown to be ineffective
c. Understand the factors that contribute to treatment success eg time of onset from when the patient was exposed/infected; possible side effects; variable adherence; cost of treatment and access