Malaga hospitals in Spain to participate in the first and largest clinical trial in Europe to help prevent Covid-19 spread in health care professionals

THE Hospital Costa de Sol and the Hospital Virgen de la Victoria in the Campus Universitario de Teatinos, in Malaga Province, will participate in the first clinical trial aimed at preventing Covid-19 in healthcare professionals. In addition to the two Malaga hospitals, the Virgen de las Nieves and Clínico San Cecilio, in Granada; Virgen Macarena, in Sevilla, and Hospital Infanta Margarita, in Córdoba, are other Andalucian hospitals which are part of this project, an example of collaboration between autonomous communities under the coordination of the Ministry of Health.

In this study, called EPICOS (Clinical Trial for the Prevention of Coronavirus Infection in Healthcare), some 4,000 professionals from 62 hospitals in 13 autonomous communities will participate and will be administered two medications to verify their effectiveness in the fight against the Coronavirus.

The objective of EPICOS, which is expected to have the first results in four weeks, is to assess the risk of developing symptomatic Covid-19 disease in high-risk healthcare personnel. To do this, one or two drugs will be administered preventively and randomly to be compared with a placebo group, in line with the guidelines of the WHO and the scientific community.

Preventive treatment will last 12 weeks, although monthly analysis will be carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of each option.

With this clinical trial, the Ministry of Health, through the National AIDS Plan and with the collaboration of the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS), seeks to protect health professionals who are on the front line of the response to the pandemic, and to patients, to whom health personnel with asymptomatic disease may inadvertently transmit the disease.

This is the largest clinical trial of these characteristics in Europe and one of the largest in the world in which it will participate, in addition to medical and nursing personnel, caretakers, radiology and laboratory technical pharmacists.