We are always in an emergency, the vaccination campaign is encountering unimaginable mountains to climb and a weapon that we have available and for which so much has been worked is used very little: we are talking about antibodies monoclonal, decisive in curing the disease when it is still in its initial stage.
What’s the situation
Italy, at the moment, has purchased 150 thousand doses that are intended for patients most exposed to contract a severe form of Covid and avoid hospitalization. Well, so far there has been more talk than fact: as he reports The messenger, the centers that currently administer them are just over a hundred (out of the 368 enabled) and, up to March 31, the patients treated with this treatment were just over a thousand throughout the nation. Very few. To give examples, out of 150 thousand doses available, Veneto has administered about 300, Tuscany and Lazio 150, Molise 4 times and Calabria only once. “The underlying problem is that the mechanism it’s complicated – explains Francesco Menichetti, Director of Infectious Diseases of the Pisan Hospital – in order for everything to work, a regular territorial assistance continuity is needed. Basically, the patient to be treated reports it to the doctor or the Usca, but after a diagnostic test carried out by the patient. However, everything must happen within 5 days. In our poor continuity of care effectiveness, the test weighs first of all, because the procurement can jam the mechanism“.
“Until yesterday the message was: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate; today the message is you do presto to equip health facilities and us operators with innovative vaccines and therapies, starting with monoclonal antibodies to fight and overcome this disease. Also to give Italians additional living spaces. Hurry up!“This is the appeal launched by the medical director of Spallanzani in Rome, Francesco Vaia.
“Guidelines are missing”
The incredible thing is that, one month after the authorization by Aifa (Italian Medicines Agency) on the use of monoclonal antibodies, family doctors report the lack of guidelines. “We have not yet been given the lines of address national policies on home care of Covid patients, nor the structured pathways that the Regions must provide to allow general practitioners to refer Covid patients in the most appropriate and fastest way to the use of these drugs“. To underline this is Tommasa Maio, vice president of Metis, Scientific Society of General Practitioners. As reported by time.news, to provide general practitioners with scientific knowledge on the subject, Metis and Fimmg (Italian Federation of General Practitioners) have planned a webinar that compares general medicine, specialist and the regulatory world in order to share a validated path for the use of these drugs.
“The possibility of timely treatment is lost”
The risk, the family doctors observe, is to lose the time window useful for the use of monoclonals. “The recent determines Aifa – explains Walter Marrocco, scientific director of Fimmg – provides for administration as early as possible with respect to the onset of symptoms, and in any case no later than 10 days from the beginning of the same “. He is also echoed by Silvestro Scotti, National Secretary General of the Italian Federation of General Practitioners who does not want to pass the idea that family doctors slow down the mechanism. “We haven’t had any clues as to how activate the procedure. We do not know who we should contact, there is no IT platform on which to connect. And then there is no training. There was not even a course on monoclonals“In all this chaos, experts are very worried about the variants of Covid: if you do not hurry to use the monoclonals already purchased and available, they could become ineffective if the virus continues to mutate with this speed, risking to throw away all the unused doses and burn the hundreds of thousands of euros that went into buying them.