Re:Chloroquine, past and present
by hprotagonist on Friday March 20, 2020 @12:55PM
(#22639114)
And so to today. As I said yesterday, I find the reports of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine activity against the coronovirus very interesting, but preliminary. There has as yet been no well-controlled trial, and unfortunately the effects seen are still the sort of thing that can look exciting but disappear when you look closely. I mean that. It happens all the time – ask anyone else who does drug research for a living. If this drug isn’t useful, then sending hundreds of millions of people out to swallow all of it that they can find will be a massive waste of time and money, and will actively harm people besides. This is not a benign compound; it should only be taken when you have a solid expectation of benefit, and (saying it again), we don’t yet have that. Better trials are cranking up right now: please, wait for those. The generic drug companies (Teva and Mylan, I’ve seen so far, and there’s this) that are cranking up production are doing the prudent thing – if this reads out well, we’ll need a lot of it. But we’ll need to give it to people who are in bad shape from the viral infection, too, remember that, and I fear that a lot of people around the world are just starting to take it now in hopes of a prophylactic effect, which is (saying it again) a bad idea.
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This snippet right here does a good job balancing optimism with caution. We need more of this.
Re:Chloroquine, past and present
by patrickbuckley on Friday March 20, 2020 @01:51PM
(#22639649)
This is a great reminder, thank you for pointing it out. Interestingly during the 1918 Spanish flu aspirin was a new drug and was given to people in an effort to reduce fever. The problem is they gave it in doses that we now know is toxic. There is some evidence that patients treated in hospitals with aspirin had a 30x!!! deathrate vs those treated "homeopathically". This YouTube video goes into the history and context of it ...
https://youtu.be/dT6mHi_8V5E (go to 11:30 in video)
I beleive in modern medicine and science but we should be careful about being overly optimistic and harming people by giving them a powerful drug that hasn't been tested properly.
Edited to add time point in video.
Those that did not take aspirin during the Spanish flu had far lower morbidity rates. Fever is not something I rush to suppress with drugs until I exceed 104.0 - same for my family and even when our daughter was a little tiny thing.
Preliminary unpublished information shows concerns on accelerating progression of SARS-CoV-2 virus to COVID-19 illness for ALL NSAIDs (not just aspirin). However, even with non-NSAIDs I exercise extreme caution when using (e.g. acetaminophen - Tylenol - 4000mg is considered VERY TOXIC for liver).