Quinine is amazing stuff and quite easy to make, but the poison is in the dosage. Controlling that when you're making your own with cinchona bark isn't something you want to do trial and error style, serious side effects.
Chloroquine, past and present
21–30 of 320 posts
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#22I was intrigued by the results from the recent quick french study: https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/20... I read through the paper, and it's not immediately obvious, but if you look at the two graphs at the bottom, the hydroxychloroquine is 75% effective in the first chart, but only 50% in the second one. That's because the actual test was: Control: 16 hydroxychloroquine: 14 hydroxychloroquin…
There is a long discussion about this study with the virologist Christian Drosten on a German podcast (transcript here: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript134.pdf), though in german only.
He was quite skeptical about the study, in particular as it doesn't have randomized groups, and e.g. the age difference between control and treatment group was very large. He also didn't consider the virus concentration in the throat to be a good endpoint to measure as from their experiments they know that it goes down over time anyway, and the virus tends to move to the lungs.
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#23How well does chloroquine mix with gin? Asking for a friend.
Mixes well, only minimal brain damage ;)
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of a comment I read on Reddit some week ago; the commenter was going from store to store looking for disinfectant for a family member that has a prosthetic and needs to disinfect it daily, lest an infection gets into the wound.
Those tiny square alcohol prep pads (e.g. for diabetics and others who need daily injections) are sold out everywhere. I suspect people who couldn't find hand sanitizer or Clorox just grabbed whatever sanitizing products they could.
I clean stuff with them. I don’t want water and some antibacterial agent, I just want some nice alcohol.
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#25This chloroquinine rush is already out of control. My pharmacy is already out of it and is unable to procure from other pharmacies (which are also out already!) My pharmacist placed orders for all her patients to prefill prescriptions (where possible) for the next few months. I can understand a shortage when there's a clear evidence-based need, but the rumour-mill hasn't even ramped to full bore yet and it's already…
I bought aquarium chloroquine to use as a last-ditch resort if I basically have to choose between taking it or dying due to hospital overcapacity. No harm to patients there IMO. I spent $60 for the 10 grams recommended for a course (.5 g a day). That was last week, and it's so much more expensive now.
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#26This chloroquinine rush is already out of control. My pharmacy is already out of it and is unable to procure from other pharmacies (which are also out already!) My pharmacist placed orders for all her patients to prefill prescriptions (where possible) for the next few months. I can understand a shortage when there's a clear evidence-based need, but the rumour-mill hasn't even ramped to full bore yet and it's already…
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Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#27This chloroquinine rush is already out of control. My pharmacy is already out of it and is unable to procure from other pharmacies (which are also out already!) My pharmacist placed orders for all her patients to prefill prescriptions (where possible) for the next few months. I can understand a shortage when there's a clear evidence-based need, but the rumour-mill hasn't even ramped to full bore yet and it's already…
I really hope this virus prompts our disaster management agencies to get their shit together, and specifically to consider supply chain security as part of their threat model (and no, we don't meaningfully do this or we wouldn't have such a pitiful national reserve of respirators and other respiratory treatment devices following SARS and MURS). Not sure exactly what this would look like, but identifying key partners in industry and working with them to enable them to turn-key ramp up production seems obvious.
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#28And 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…
This snippet right here does a good job balancing optimism with caution. We need more of this.
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#29This chloroquinine rush is already out of control. My pharmacy is already out of it and is unable to procure from other pharmacies (which are also out already!) My pharmacist placed orders for all her patients to prefill prescriptions (where possible) for the next few months. I can understand a shortage when there's a clear evidence-based need, but the rumour-mill hasn't even ramped to full bore yet and it's already…
I really hope this virus prompts our disaster management agencies to get their shit together, and specifically to consider supply chain security as part of their threat model (and no, we don't meaningfully do this or we wouldn't have such a pitiful national reserve of respirators and other respiratory treatment devices following SARS and MURS). Not sure exactly what this would look like, but identifying key partners…
How could our disaster management agencies have gotten their shit together to anticipate a run on an old anit-malaria drug?
Re: Chloroquine, past and present
#30This chloroquinine rush is already out of control. My pharmacy is already out of it and is unable to procure from other pharmacies (which are also out already!) My pharmacist placed orders for all her patients to prefill prescriptions (where possible) for the next few months. I can understand a shortage when there's a clear evidence-based need, but the rumour-mill hasn't even ramped to full bore yet and it's already…
This is where having a fully funded CDC and pandemic team in the US pays off. They would have been paying very close attention for weeks on end in China, Italy and South Korea and many approaches could have been already dead-ended before it even significantly reached out shores. To say nothing of actually being in the process of ramping up medications that HAVE shown to be effective. It feels like we are starting fro…
I think everyone would like to see the CDC be better funded. Hindsight makes that an obvious mistake, but monitoring C19 should have been their number one priority in any case. From January onwards it was clear that it was the number one threat. There's still no explanation (afaik) for why they rolled their own test instead of using the WHO's test, nor have they effectively communicated their plans for ramping up testing or medical capacity. I don't see how this is anything besides mismanagement (e.g., how does funding impact which test they used? Presumably being under-funded would prompt them to use the test that the rest of the world is going with instead of rolling their own), and I really hope congress or the justice dept rips into this after the crisis is averted.
EDIT: Note that I say all of this as someone who is a big believer in "it's almost always more complicated/nuanced than it looks", but there seems to be no information about said nuance or complexity.