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Chloroquine, past and present

blogs.sciencemag.org

151–160 of 320 posts

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#151
post #117
post #97

Only one clinical study has been published on chloroquine (by a French group), and the results are lackluster. No patient was cleared of virus after six days using hydroxychloroquine alone. A tiny fraction of patients were cleared in 4 days using an adjunct therapy (azithromycin). The study itself has issues, and it's not even clear whether it will clear peer review. The President is doing something very dangerous he…

Are you referring to this study? https://drive.google.com/file/d/186Bel9RqfsmEx55FDum4xY_IlWS... Afaikt, 57% patients on HCQ alone were “virologically cleared” by day 6 and 100% on HCQ+Azithromycin were clear By day 6. Compared with ~12% of control group.

Yes, and I'm looking at the aggregate data in the last two graphs, and also the big table.

HCQ + AZ was the only group with clearance for all after six days. It was also the smaller of the two groups, which makes it hard to give any weight to the finding. But there are many other features of this study that make the result hard to interpret.

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#152
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study from France seems to suck, though. Not very valuable data. They measured virus, not outcomes, they measured virus in the throat, not the lungs, the starting point was not the start of the disease but some later (more arbitrary) point in time, the two groups were not randomly assigned and the study wasn’t really blind. It could be that they just happened to compare two groups where the treatment group was fu…

On the 26th February, in an interview, one of the researchers behind the French study said that he wasn't worried about Covid-19 and that it was just a flu...

I wanted to write this comment. The researcher is indeed a specialist from what I read on the internet but given his total turn about concerning Covid I would personally not put any trust in his work. He participated in the crisis the country is facing right now, by saying on social networks there was no real danger about the virus.

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean COVID is as fatal as cancer or Chloroquine is?

COVID. For >70 y.o. individuals mortality rate is 30%. If you're >70 y.o. have heart condition and have diabetes (all risk factors) COVID is clearly more deadly than some (most?) cancers, not to mention it kills in the order of weeks, when cancer kills in the order of months or years.

"For >70 y.o. individuals mortality rate is 30%."

Where are you getting this number? It is significantly higher than any I have seen.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm - TABLE. Hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and case–fatality percentages for reported COVID–19 cases, by age group —United States, February 12–March 16, 2020

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... - Age of Coronavirus Deaths

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean COVID is as fatal as cancer or Chloroquine is?

COVID. For >70 y.o. individuals mortality rate is 30%. If you're >70 y.o. have heart condition and have diabetes (all risk factors) COVID is clearly more deadly than some (most?) cancers, not to mention it kills in the order of weeks, when cancer kills in the order of months or years.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm gives a CFR of 4.3–10.5% for age group 75-84 and 10.4–27.3% for age group ≥85. Your number is over that by quite a bit, where is it from?

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't think folks are reading the whole article.

I'm not suggesting immediately starting to dose millions of people with it. I'm suggesting massively ramping up production so that if it turns out to be useful, we can at that point immediately start dosing millions of people with it. I think it likely that the cost of massively increasing hydroxychloroquine production would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total resources being spent on tackling the crisis. S…

Note that if hydroxychloroquine is not effective, your production facilities will be tied up if you do find something else that is effective.

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#156

This is pretty interesting. I've been taking Plaquenil (hydroxochloroquine) regularly for 6 months now to control an auto-immune disease, and I came down with potential symptoms of covid-19 2 weeks ago, but it was very mild - just a sore throat and cough that lasted 4 days, and I had a slight fever the first night. I self quarantined just in case, but after recovering thought I must have just caught a cold, since my…

That's like me, and I haven't taken plaquenil or anything at all. Just got a weirdly sore throat yesterday, a very slight fever, a bit of a woozy head. Ten hours of sleep later and the fever went away, but I'm not stepping outside.

There's a word for it, and the word is anecdata. You can trust anecdata about as far as you can throw them.

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#157
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Why spend 2 weeks To acquire immunity while there are still hospital beds available in some places, in the unlikely event that you need one. That won't be the case a month from now.

How utterly and inconceivably selfish. How would that work out if everyone thought like that?

Is it really? I've heard there's some logic to this…

If instead, we all stay home and quarantine, the second we start reducing the quarantine the virus flares back up again. If instead, we start acquiring immunity in low-risk populations, at a rate that the hospitals can sustain, we'll have a degree of herd immunity and a portion of the population that can no longer spread it.

I'm certainly not an epidemiologist though; anyone smarter than me that can way in on that thinking?

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#158

Is there not an argument that given chloroquine's apparent efficacy, albeit statistically weakly or improperly demonstrated (so far), along with its long history of relative safety in anti-malarial prophylaxis (with known caveats), set against an exponential growth in dangerous pneumonia - it is therefore rational to want to at least offer it to all suspected cases and healthworkers in balance of the serious risks th…

No. Because that vast majority of cases are mold or asymptomatic.

"mild" means "you probably have pneumonia, just not bad enough that it could suddenly kill you, so you don't need to be in the hospital (yet?)"

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#159
Also take a look at thymoquinone, which supposedly inhibits mouse coronavirus, which is very similar to SARS-coronavirus.

The effects of Nigella sativa (Ns), Anthemis hyalina (Ah) and Citrus sinensis (Cs) extracts on the replication of coronavirus and the expression of TRP genes family https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933739/

Thymoquinone is also generally protective of lung health in several models: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10520295.2019.16... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31044379 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31143688

It is found in orange peel and black seed (Nigella sativa) extract.

Re: Chloroquine, past and present

#160

Is there not an argument that given chloroquine's apparent efficacy, albeit statistically weakly or improperly demonstrated (so far), along with its long history of relative safety in anti-malarial prophylaxis (with known caveats), set against an exponential growth in dangerous pneumonia - it is therefore rational to want to at least offer it to all suspected cases and healthworkers in balance of the serious risks th…

In the discussion of the study over on Reddit, there were anecdotes of physicians prescribing hydroxychloroquine for themselves and their families, in enough numbers to make it difficult for patients previously prescribed it.
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