ABSTRACT
Knowledge, attitude and practice of precautionary and preventive measures towards a contagious disease like COVID-19 are vital to control the proliferation of the disease. This study aimed to assess the level of knowledge, attitude, and practice of the students of the college of pharmacy at King Saud University towards COVID-19 and its effect on their learning process. A web-based, cross-sectional questionnaire-oriented survey study was conducted in May 2020. All the students enrolled at the college of pharmacy, King Saud University, Riyadh, were invited to participate in this study. 172 students took part in the study, of which 56.4% were females and 43.6% were males. The mean total knowledge score was 3.16 +/- 1.11, ranging from 1 to 5. When answering the knowledge questions, there was no significant difference between male students (3.22 +/- 0.98) and female students (3.11 +/- 1.21). For the attitude and practice, more males were maintaining a social distance of 1 m from others than females, and it was also observed that more females thought that virtual classes are an effective learning tool than their male counterparts. The results of this study showed that pharmacy students had good knowledge about the COVID-19 pandemic and displayed a positive attitude and good preventive and precautionary practices.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 viral infection is linked to a severe pulmonary reaction, leading to an acute lung injury in a large percentage of affected patients. Various inflammatory pathways regulated by SARS-CoV-2 are under-investigated. Some potential therapeutic options aimed to alleviate the inflammatory response of SARS-CoV-2 infection are involving different strategies for blocking the activation of its binding receptors on host cells and immunomodulation. Given that excessive lung inflammation is likely to cause death in Covid-19 patients, using nitric oxide (NO) pathway to mitigate this risk appears to be a reasonable approach to avoid serious lung injury. Such therapy could be paired with systemic immunomodulatory therapy to combat the multiple organ damage of Covid-19. Therefore, regulating the NO pathway has a potential therapeutic strategy to minimize the mortality of SARS-CoV-2 infection. © 2020, Romanian Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a new strain that was discovered in 2019 and has not been previously identified in humans. On December 31st 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of a cluster of cases with pneumonia of unknown origin from Wuhan City, Hubei province of China. The WHO announced in February 2020 that COVID-19 is the official name of the coronavirus diseases. A total of 519,899 confirmed cases with 23,592 deaths linked to this pathogen as on March 27, 2020 have been reported. Due to increasing number of infected people across the continents and huge loss to human life, the WHO has declared the novel COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. A pandemic is defined as the "worldwide spread" of a new disease. Currently, no COVID-19 specific treatments have been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA). However, the current treatment options include hydroxychloroquine, tocilizumab, remdesivir, lopinavir-ritonavir (Kaletra®), and nitazoxanide. In recent past, some natural herbal compounds have demonstrated encouraging anti-viral properties. This article attempted to summarize available information on the reported anti-viral activity of some natural products.