Day: June 7, 2021

ATHENS – Authorities on Greece’s most popular tourist island, Mykonos, will deploy more than a dozen drones to spot those who defy safety protocols aimed at preventing the spread and resurgence of COVID-19.

The decision, known as “Operation Mykonos,” comes after a string of local so-called “Corona-parties” organized by entrepreneurs at private villas and estates in recent weeks to bypass safety rules banning the operation of nightclubs.

It also comes as the beleaguered government of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis scrambles to revive its battered tourism sector, luring foreign travelers — mainly from the United States, Europe, Israel, and Russia — with the promise of a safe summer holiday stay under the Greek sun.

Foreign travelers are required to abide by local lockdowns, curfews, and safety protocols during their stays. Under “Operation Mykonos,” authorities will deploy 15 drones to fly over private villas or establishments in Mykonos that in recent weeks were host to parties packed with hundreds of locals and foreigners. Ten-member strong teams of officers will also be formed to raid the establishments upon notice, arresting and fining the offenders, authorities told VOA.

Fines range between $365 to over $6,000.

Officials tell VOA the measures, coupled with heightened police controls, inspections and added surveillance cameras across Mykonos, will serve as a blueprint for other popular hotspots among foreign travelers. These include Rhodes, Santorini and Paros, according to authorities.

“Illegal parties spell a greater risk of seeing the virus spread, infecting more and more people,” warned Nikos Hardalias, the head of Greece’s Civil Protection Agency, on Sunday. “It spells a spike in COVID cases that can lead to fresh restrictions, leading businesses to shut down, causing major damage to tourist areas.”

“It is high time,” he warned, “for everyone to size up to the challenge and take on full responsibility of their actions.”

On Monday, government spokesman Aristotelia Peloni also criticized the mushrooming “corona-parties” gripping the country, saying she wished “Greece’s youth showed similar zeal and enthusiasm in the state’s nationwide vaccination drive.”

“The country’s freedom,” she said, “can only come through comprehensive immunization.”

Effectively in lockdown since last November, Greece started easing some of its sweeping restrictions, including curfews and travel bans, in mid-May when it re-launched international travel.

The latest crackdown, however, underscores the paradox of what critics call a hasty and ill-thought-out strategy.

“You can’t say ‘restaurants and bars can open but no music playing in the background to block crowds from gathering,’” said Heracles Zissimopoulos, a leading entrepreneur on the island of Mykonos. “It’s absurd.”

“The government should seriously rethink its policy, and provide locals and tourists with an outlet, instead. Otherwise, these types of parties will be difficult to stop,” he added.

Greece recorded less than 3,000 cases during the country’s first bout with the pandemic. But as tourists streamed in last summer, infections and deaths sky-rocketed, making Greeks apprehensive to foreign travelers.

But with 20 percent of the nation’s domestic output reliant on tourism, Greeks now know they can ill afford to lose a second summer tourism season in a row.

Under a campaign called “Blue Freedom,” the government wants to vaccinate all 700,000 or so adult residents of Greece’s islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas by the end of June, hoping Greece can be included in Britain’s revised green-list of travel nations. All islanders are being offered the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine to boost immunization.

As of early June, Mykonos had vaccinated about four in ten of its residents, and Santorini over 50% — among the highest in the country.

Source: Voice Of America

WASHINGTON – The first new drug against Alzheimer’s disease in nearly two decades received a conditional and controversial green light from U.S. drug regulators on Monday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved biotech company Biogen’s antibody drug aducanumab. The drug reduces the amyloid plaques that riddle the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

But the approval drew sharp criticism from experts who note that the company has not proved that it slows the debilitating cognitive decline in patients with the disease.

The FDA will require Biogen to continue testing the drug after it is released and ultimately demonstrate that patients actually do fare better on the drug.

In the meantime, the company said the drug will cost each patient $56,000 per year, but is likely to be covered by most insurers, including Medicare.

Alzheimer’s, a degenerative neurological disease, is responsible for roughly two-thirds of the 50 million cases of dementia worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

Aducanumab, marketed as Aduhelm, is the first approved treatment to target the underlying disease process of Alzheimer’s rather than just treat the symptoms.

In two clinical trials, aducanumab reduced amyloid plaques by 59% to 71% after 18 months.

However, those studies were stopped early because they did not show that patients taking aducanumab were declining in brain function any slower than patients who were not taking it.

Biogen reevaluated the data from a subset of patients in one trial and found a slight improvement in patients receiving the highest dose.

The FDA decided to approve the drug under what is called accelerated approval, which has a lower standard of evidence than full approval. The FDA said Biogen’s data show that reducing amyloid plaques is “reasonably likely to result in clinical benefit.”

“This pathway allows FDA to provide patients suffering with a serious disease earlier access to a potentially valuable drug when there is some residual uncertainty about the clinical benefit of the drug,” Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said on a call with reporters.

Patients’ groups cheered.

“This approval is a victory for people living with Alzheimer’s and their families,” Harry Johns, president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association, an advocacy group, said in a statement.

“It is a new day,” he said. “This approval allows people living with Alzheimer’s more time to live better. For families it means being able to hold on to their loved ones longer. It is about reinvigorating scientists and companies in the fight against this scourge of a disease. It is about hope.”

Not everyone agreed.

“The FDA is saying, ‘Never mind the lack of determined effectiveness,'” said Lon Schneider, director of the California Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Southern California.

Reducing plaques is not the same as slowing the patient’s decline, he noted. It will be like doctors telling patients, “‘You need to be confident (that) because we’re knocking down the plaques, you’re benefiting.'”

Others were skeptical that Biogen will do a satisfactory follow-up study to show its drug really works.

“Past experience with accelerated approval ‘conditions’ has been disappointing in a lot of respects,” said Harvard Medical School professor Aaron Kesselheim, “with too many cases of ‘confirmatory trials’ taking too long, still testing surrogate measures rather than real clinical endpoints, and even keeping the drug indication on the labeling when the confirmatory trials are negative.”

Other therapies are in the pipeline, and some hope that the FDA’s move opens the door to better treatments down the road.

“History has shown us that approvals of the first drug in a new category invigorates the field, increases investments in new treatments and encourages greater innovation,” the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer, Maria Carrillo, said in a statement.

“While today’s approval is an important first step in our ongoing fight against Alzheimer’s,” the FDA’s Cavazzoni said, “it’s just that: the first step.”

Source: Voice Of America