UNMC Professor on National Board for Coronavirus Guidelines
By Jeff Turner
Dr. Susan Swindells, M.B.B.S.
A press release put out by the University of Nebraska Medical Center reveals that Dr. Susan Swindells, M.B.B.S. has been working as a part of an expert panel that has discovered treatment guidelines for the Coronavirus. She was invited to join the panel by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as one of twenty-seven institutes that encompass the National Institute of Health. Fauci has become a household name in the time since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
Dr. Swindells is a professor of internal medicine-infectious diseases at UNMC – some of her most notable research includes work in the fields of HIV and Aids – which she has been working in since the 1980s. In March of 2020 – she was named the 14th UNMC Science Laureate. “I am honored to work with all of these smart and thoughtful people,” she said.
Debra Romberger, M.D., chair of the UNMC Department of Internal Medicine, offered praise of Dr. Swindells, “Dr. Swindells is extremely well-qualified to contribute to this NIH panel – her experience with bringing new treatment strategies to infectious diseases such as tuberculous and HIV gives her great insight.”
“We’ve been asked to develop federal treatment guidelines to help doctors and nurses on the front lines know how to treat patients with coronavirus,” Dr. Swindells said. The discoveries the panel has unearthed include health conditions that will leave people of any age more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 (these include Hypertension, Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes, Cancer, Obesity, Renal Disease, and Chronic Respiratory diseases). “Dr. Fauci decided we should come up with some federal guidelines to help practicing clinicians on the front line.”
“There’s a huge amount of information flying around, particularly about how to treat patients who have this coronavirus and nobody’s quite sure what to do because we don’t have good quality evidence to base any of our decisions on and we don’t have treatments for this like we do for things like blood pressure, diabetes, and infectious diseases such as HIV where you can say ‘recommended treatment is X’”, said Dr. Swindells. There have been debates as to the best cure for the Coronavirus – President Trump has touted the merits of a combination of hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and lupus, and Azithromycin – an antibiotic used to treat various bacterial infections. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to sign off on this treatment option, and the NIH treatment guidelines panel has concluded as of this writing that they cannot recommend this treatment option nor can they discourage it.
A second potential cure that is being researched is Remdesivir, an antiviral medication that was initially developed to respond to the recent Ebola crisis. It has not been approved by the FDA for full use, but there are plans to approve it for emergency use. According to CNN, during the trials – Remdesivir reduced the recovery time for the Coronavirus from fifteen days to eleven days with the drug potentially being able to reduce the possibility of COVID patients dying.
Potential treatment guidelines are expected to be updated as the panel makes more discoveries, you can keep track of future updates at https://covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/