What is going on with dexamethasone?

Yesterday, our website statistics suddenly went through the roof! Unexpectedly, we saw the traffic on our platform increase rapidly by the minute. A quick web search taught us that it was because of the unveiling of the positive test results about dexamethasone use on COVID-19 patients.

Dexamethasone, a well-known corticosteroid, has been shown to reduce fatalities by one-third with COVID-19 patients on life support in the ICU, according to clinical trial tests performed by researchers at the University of Oxford. Although the test results are still preliminary, they have shown a very clear reduction in the risk of death among patients with severe respiratory complications.

This drug is widely available, and most hospitals worldwide will have it in stock already. Plus, the raw material is known to be inexpensive and can be taken by everyone.

This makes it no surprise that WHO (World Health Organization) director Dr. T. Ghebreyesus can be quoted as saying this is a “lifesaving scientific breakthrough” and as an organization has embraced these positive test results. The full data analysis of the research will be released in the next few days, but healthcare professionals and governments worldwide have responded with great interest.

Going back to our platform, we will learn that there are more than a dozen producers of this API, and they are spread all over the world. China, France, Malaysia, India, Italy and the United States are the countries where the producers are based, and most of them have already been producing dexamethasone for decades. In just 24 hours, we saw nearly 10.000 visitors on the result page for dexamethasone alone, which makes it the current most searched API on our platform.

To finish on a personal note, I am thankful for all the hard work being done worldwide to combat the COVID-19 crisis, and specifically, these test results and the news about dexamethasone are fascinating to me. I look forward to any other developments, whether with dexamethasone or other APIs and will keep you updated on any major developments.

As a platform, we will continue our work of making sure all pharmacists worldwide will have access to this and other APIs through searching, comparing, inquiring and ordering via Pharmaoffer.