ABU Professors Develop COVID-19 Cure, to Release to Public

A team of professors from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria says it has found a cure for COVID-19.

Speaking exclusively with Daily Trust on Wednesday, one of the leading researchers, Professor Haruna Abdu Kaita, said the COVID-19 remedy was developed from local plants that are available in different parts of Nigeria.

This is coming few days after President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the importation of COVID Organics, a herbal syrup being fronted by Andry Rajoelina, the president of Madagascar, as both a vaccine for the prevention and cure of COVID-19.

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President Buhari’s decision had attracted criticism from different quarters in Nigeria with the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria describing it as an insult on the country’s group of pharmacists, scientists, and researchers.

He said when the medication is made public, the herbs used would also be made public “for the sake of transparency.”

“We are not businessmen; therefore, we would not hide anything to the public.

“We will disclose all the plants we used in developing the medication.

“We will do this for scientists across the world to scrutinise our remedy and come up with any challenge; particularly regarding the safety of the medication.

“What I mean is that, everything we used will be made public for scientific scrutiny.”

Kaita said the only thing that his team will not disclose is the proportion of different plants used in the production of the anti-COVID-19 medicine.

This, he said, would be kept as their intellectual property.

He added that an elder statesman and former Vice-Chancellor of the ABU, Professor Abdullahi Mustapha, is also part of the team.

This development has placed ABU Zaria in the leadership position among Nigerian universities in terms of research and innovation towards the fight against the deadly coronavirus.

Recall that Usman Dalhatu, a 200-level student of Mechanical Engineering at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, in April 2020, designed and produced a manual ventilator, to be used in treating coronavirus patients.

Dalhatu, who just clocked 20, Said he decided to fabricate the manual ventilator as part of efforts to assist the Federal Government (FG) contain the pandemic, whose cases have been on the rise in the country.

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Usman later transformed his emergency ventilator idea into an ultra-modern portable E-vent automatic ventilator named respire-19.

The Kaduna State ICT Hub recently granted financial resources to Dalhatu Usman for the production of ‘sophisticated’ ventilators. A task he has since commenced.

Just days ago, a team of ABU engineers designed and developed an ICU ventilator and a 4-in-1 automatic hand sanitizing machine at the Equipment maintenance and development center of the University.

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