Brazil To Test Vaccine As Europe Emerges From Lockdown

Rio de Janeiro, June 3 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Jun, 2020 ) :Researchers in hard-hit Brazil on Wednesday said they would begin testing a coronavirus vaccine developed in Britain, while across the Atlantic European nations began reopening borders in a bid to emerge from months of devastation caused by the disease.

Authorities in Brazil -- the latest frontline of the pandemic, with deaths and infections on the rise -- imposed fresh restrictions in the country's northeast after reporting "extremely high" numbers of cases.

Concern over the spread of the coronavirus in Latin America has increased even as the health crisis has eased in other regions of the world.

"The Americas continues to account for the most cases," World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing in Geneva.

The UN body also said it would resume trials of hydroxychloroquine a week after halting them following a study in The Lancet medical journal that suggested the drug could harm COVID-19 patients.

The U-turn came after The Lancet itself cast doubt on the study after it was widely contested by scientists.

Another study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday suggested that taking hydroxychloroquine shortly after being exposed to COVID-19 does not help prevent infection in a statistically meaningful way, however.

The WHO has been holding clinical trials to find a treatment for COVID-19, which has killed more than 382,000 people and wrought vast economic damage since emerging in China late last year.