East Cape-raised prof assists in Covid breakthrough

A UK clinical trial led by Eastern Cape-raised Oxford University professor of primary health care, David Butler, has confirmed that a commonly prescribed asthma steroid drug shortens the Covid-19 recovery time in non-hospitalised elderly patients by three days.

According to PRINCIPLE, the world’s largest platform trial of community-based treatments for Covid-19, it was found that the inhaled common corticosteroid — budesonide — lowers inflammation in the body.

Butler is the chief investigator, a South Wales GP and professor of primary care at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield department of primary care health sciences.

A former student activist and president of the Rhodes

University SRC, Butler is the son of the late Eastern Cape poet, novelist and Rhodes University English head, Guy Butler.

Butler said inhaled budesonide was safe, relatively inexpensive and readily available.

It was used around the world in inhalers to treat asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Butler and his team discovered the asthma drug significantly shortened the recovery time of patients who were treating Covid-19 at home and away from the hospital.

PRINCIPLE said the findings from the clinical trial, which had 1,770 participants, could potentially change how Covid19 was treated in its early stages.

He said medical practitioners around the world, including SA, could use the trial’s findings when making treatment decisions. Butler said recruitment for the trial stopped at the end of March this year because enough patients had been enrolled to establish whether or not the drug had any meaningful benefit on time recovery.

“Based on the interim analysis using the latest data from March 25 2021, the results showed the estimated median [middle] time to self-reported recovery for inhaled budesonide was 3.011 days shorter compared to usual care,” he said.

“We anticipate that medical practitioners around the world caring for people with Covid19 in the community, may wish to consider this evidence when making treatment decisions, as it should help people with Covid-19 recover quicker,” Butler said.

Butler was a Rhodes University English literature undergraduate who went on to study medicine at the University of Cape Town in the 1980s.

Initially working in paediatrics, he refused to be conscripted into the apartheid SA Defence Force (SADF) and left the country to work in Toronto Canada.

As the regime began to crumble, he returned to SA to work in internal medicine at Cecilia Makiwane Hospital in Mdantsane.

In 1990 Butler moved to the UK and spent a year working in psychiatry.

He then studied epidemiology at the University of Toronto and later, as an associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, where he joined primary care research with family medicine practice.

He returned to the UK in 2002, as professor of primary care at Cardiff University.