Saying that someone took X when referring to a chemical, and X is just a scary way of describing a use for that chemical, is really just FUD tactics. You know what else you could say that is just as meaningful? So-and-so died because they took an 'aquarium cleaner'... where the reference is to Water, which is also used when cleaning aquariums. Everything is chemicals.

See below, likely other ingredients were involved and like others mention the difficulty of selecting the right dosing from an aquarium product makes it very pertinent to point out the source of what they took. Not FUD, just trying to add more context.

Your quoted source "A man has died and his wife is under critical care after the couple, both in their 60s, ingested chloroquine phosphate, an additive commonly used at aquariums to clean fish tanks." doesn't actually say these particular people used a fish tank product as their source of chloroquine phosphate.

This comment is harshly worded but explains the subtly well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22670152

Apparently chloroquine phosphate is the right drug and it's a synonym for chloroquine the drug. https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-8633/chloroquine-oral/det...

Also all the wikipedia references are about chloroquine phosphate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine#References

Looks like they did take the right drug, but OD'd or something.

Looks like the aquarium version is likely not the same as the pharmaceutical one...

>Keep in mind if you decide to use the tablets, there are some inactive ingredients, which you may have to deal with, e.g., Camauba Wax, Colloidal Silicon Dioxide, Dibasic Calcium Phosphate, Hydroxypropyl Methylcellulose, Magnesium Stearate, Microcrystalline Cellulose, Polyethylene Glycol, Polysorbate 80, Pregelatinized Starch, Sodium Starch Glycolate, Stearic Acid, and Titanium Dioxide. And as mentioned earlier in this chapter there are occasions where some medicines are not in their pure form (100% pure), i.e., mixed with a substance called a 'carrier,' which should be noted on its label.

https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/topic/406204-chloroquine-ph...

It's a salt rather than a synonym.

Drugs often come as a salt made from some active ingredient (here, chloroquine) and a counterion (phosphate). This often makes the active ingredient more soluble than the charged active ingredient alone.

Aquarium cleaner likely contains more than just this one particular chemical, plus water. They may also have had comorbidities.

To be more accurate the French study was for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) not just chloroquine phosphate which this couple apparently took...

chloroquine phosphate might be one of many compounds of a cleaning product for aquariums. One other very common part of cleaning products, and extremely toxic, is chlorine. Was this specific cleaning product intended to be used when the fish are still in the tank?

Its things like this which is the reason why Sweden has almost banned every cleaning product that has the word alcohol as one of its ingredient, and those that still have it usually must have something that cause vomiting if ingested. People poison themselves (which is I think the more technical correct term than overdosing), and if people will look at something like a cleaning product and think "I will drink this" then there is not much options available.

> if people will look at something like a cleaning product and think "I will drink this" then there is not much options available.

Last year I watched as a homeless man squirted hand sanitizer into a cup then drink it. Before a woman yelled at him and started calling 911. He disappeared pretty quickly after that, so not sure what ever happened to him.

Fun fact: The hand sanitizer stand he used was one of the ones installed around public areas in Toronto after the last SARS outbreak.

Hand sanitizer with alcohol is one such product that does not exist in Swedish stores. There is gels and other similar products that evaporate but they do not actually include any alcohol.

I remember many years ago that there was a campaign to inform the public of this fact as people still continued for a while to ingest those products under the idea that they still had alcohol in them. Many products also had for a while big lables that said "No alcohol". As far as I know the regulation has been quite a success.

That's interesting, Sweden is more aggressive with this sort of thing. That'd be a controversial move even here in Canada.

The CDC recommends using alcohol sanitizer over non-alcohol ones:

> Many studies have found that sanitizers with an alcohol concentration between 60–95% are more effective at killing germs than those with a lower alcohol concentration or non-alcohol-based hand sanitizers. Hand sanitizers without 60-95% alcohol 1) may not work equally well for many types of germs; and 2) merely reduce the growth of germs rather than kill them outright.

https://www.propublica.org/article/coronavirus-hand-sanitize...

A friend who lived in Sweden told me the stores there shut down early and it was hard to find a place to buy alcohol (the Swedish state-run liquor store closes at 3pm on Saturday and is completely closed on Sunday). So if your flight arrives late to the city you might miss out.

Culture plays a big role in getting support for this sort of thing... Ontario used to be more like Sweden but recently expanded the hours of our state-run liquor store (until 11pm) and let grocery stores sell beer/cider.

There's an important detail missing: the dose.

I gather that the therapeutic dose is on the order of 500 mg/day. So did they eat 10x that, 100x that, or what?

Given it's a bulk cleaning product, they'd need some damn finely calibrated scales to measure out anything more precise than "a pinch". Which clearly isn't good when 3x the clinical dose will land you in hospital.

I just bought an electronic scale with 10 mg accuracy for $30, so hey.

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