Health

Colombo, May 26 (AP-PTI) Sri Lanka has received 500,000 doses of Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine donated by China as the Indian Ocean island nation faces severe shortage of vaccines amid a recent rise in infections.

The vaccine stock that arrived early Wednesday is the second donation from China, following a shipment of 600,000 doses in March.

Sri Lanka is facing a shortage of vaccine after the producer in neighboring India failed to provide the promised Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine stocks. The government on Tuesday agreed to buy 14 million doses of Sinopharm from China.

New Delhi, May 26 (PTI) Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday said the manufacturers of Sputnik V have agreed to supply the Russian anti-Covid vaccine to Delhi but its quantity is yet to be decided.

He also said that there were around 620 cases of black fungus or mucormycosis in the city, but there is a shortage of Amphotericin-B injections used in its treatment.

New Delhi, May 26 (PTI) Scientists have developed two new drugs to both prevent the COVID-19 infection, and also treat people who have been exposed to the novel coronavirus so that they do not develop severe disease.

The peptide-based drugs developed by researchers at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia are being tested in hamsters at France's pre-clinical and clinical research facility, IDMIT.

Early promising results, published in the journal Nature Cell Discovery, show the drugs are not toxic, and have few side effects.

Dehradun, May 26 (PTI) The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has served a defamation notice on Ramdev for alleged disparaging remarks against allopathy and allopathic doctors, demanding an apology from him within 15 days, failing which it said it will demand a compensation of Rs 1,000 crore from the yoga guru.

New Delhi, May 25 (PTI) Delhi University's Hindu College lost one of its professors to coronavirus on Tuesday, its principal Dr Anju Srivastava said.

Dr CL Jonwal (43), was a zoology professor, who succumbed to the virus in the early hours on Tuesday at AIIMS.

He was promoted to the post of associate professor on March 30, and is survived by his wife and a daughter, aged 12, and a son, aged 5. His wife is an ad-hoc teacher of mathematics in the varsity.

New Delhi, May 25 (PTI) There is no reason to believe that children will be disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in the coming weeks and months or in the next wave, the head of a government working group said, but stressed on the need for additional resource inputs to improve the paediatric Covid services.

Coimbatore, May 23 (PTI) Tamil Nadu on Sunday received four Oxygen Express trains from Odisha, carrying a total of 254.56 metric tonnes of the life saving gas.

The trains arrived in the state on Sunday afternoon, a Southern Railway release said.

Three Oxygen Express trains reached the Inland Container Depot in Chennai.

Another train from Rourkela chugged into Madukkarai near Coimbatore.

Till date, 1024.18 MT of oxygen has been delivered to the state, it said.

Jhansi, May 23 (PTI) Some junior doctors of a college were stopped from meeting Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath during a review meeting here on Sunday, with senior officials saying this was done to ensure there was no disruption during the meet.

The doctors were from the Jhansi Medical College and they wanted to submit to the chief minister a memorandum which included that the institute's central library be kept open for 24 hours, sources said.

New Delhi/Chandigarh, May 23 (PTI) Lockdown was extended on Sunday in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Puducherry, with many states already imposing COVID-induced restrictions till May-end to rein in the spread of infection and the mounting deaths which crossed the three lakh mark.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that the ongoing lockdown in the national capital will continue for another week and said the process of "unlock" will start from May 31 in a phased manner if the number of COVID-19 cases continues to decline.

Mumbai, May 24 (PTI) The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has stopped new admissions of COVID-19 patients at three jumbo facilities in the city till June 1 due to pre-monsoon repair work, the BMC said on Monday.

Most of the patients from these facilities, located at the Bandra-Kurla Complex, Dahisar and Mulund, were shifted to other hospitals before cyclone Tauktae, Dr Rajesh Dere, dean of the jumbo COVID-19 centre at the BKC, said.