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Eric -<br>
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<p class="">I understand Hydroxychloroquine to have been
used widely in developing (equatorial) countries as an
antiviral (in particular Malaria) \</p>
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Not antiviral, Steve. Plasmodium isn’t even a bacterium; it is
a protozoan. One of us, gooble gobble. </div>
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<p>yes to protozoan, I shortcut a bit too much... I was mostly
referencing the anecdotal experience of a friend who did 2 years
in Africa in the 90s as a Peace Corps volunteer. He contracted
Malaria and was prescribed a series of rounds of
Hydroxychloroquine as the remedy (against the protozoa
responsible). The doses he was given were so strong as to have
many (short term) negative side-effects especially heaped on top
of his malaria symptoms. I think he even had a couple of heavy
rounds a year or more after returning to knock down flare-ups. <br>
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<p>According to him, Hydroxycholoroquine was (among
Americans/Europeans in Africa in his circle) treated as a
broad-spectrum preventative/cure to *many things* including many
viruses. It isn't clear that was good medicine or by some
measure more a placebo with limited long-term side-effects they
can throw an anything with limited negative consequences? I
can't imagine what it feels like to be a 3rd world MD trying to
raise public health against terrible odds while also dealing with
first-world do-gooders (or badders like arms and diamond dealers)
who have (relatively) minor problems given their overall state of
health and access to prime health care before and after living
there. Maybe throwing synthetic Quinine at first-worlders was an
easy thing to do to get them out of the office?</p>
<p>The kind of conflation I offered up could easily feed/explain
those who have (or still are) pushed synthetic Quinine as a remedy
for Covid-19. My bad. My daughter ( a virologist studying
Flavis) would not be pleased. She is also rabidly ant-anti-vaxx
and anti-anti-science, though she is having a crisis of trust with
medical science (as a system, not a science).<br>
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<p>As you point out, the mechanism seems to involve raising the pH
enough to interfere with reproduction of the protozoan or some
viruses, and it is too easy to conflate en-vivo with en-vitro
contexts. Like Trump's idea of injecting bleach (or whatever he
*actually* said that was easily refactored into something that
bluntly brain-dead).<br>
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<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128816/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128816/</a></p>
<p>I was surprised to discover that 2 liters of Tonic Water is
assumed to be an equivalent dose to the prescribed standard dose
of Quinine in pill form. I have to admit to a significant
fondness for Gin and Tonic, but I don't know that I could maintain
that level of consumption for more than a day or two. One liter
sounds a lot more reasonable. At my preferred 1/3 gin, 1/3
Tonic, 1/3 ice that leads to a mere 3-4 jiggers of gin a day?<br>
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<p>- Steve<br>
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<div>Don’t mean to be a pedant. But to the extent that we think
things work for reasons, major domain distinctions are likely
affect what we think deserves time to follow up.</div>
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<div>I have a colleague who gave a talk at SFI once (on
metastasis in cancers), in which as a supporting tangent to an
argument about difficulty, he commented that he had had fungal
toenail infection since teenage, when as an athlete he had
developed it from locker room showers in England, and in the
subsequent decades been unable to get rid of it. His next
sentence: “And that’s a different _kingdom_!” But the least
different from us you can get without going to the animals,
and that was enough to drastically lower the interventions
available for it. His point: imagine how much harder it is to
get rid of a cancer cell line that is your own personal
genome, mostly. (Be your own, personal, genome.)</div>
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<div>Also, on Nick’s question about parasites. I haven’t read
the studies showing antiviral activity of ivermectin in vitro
(I am not as good a person as REC, by a lot, but we knew
that), but from what I have read, I gather that they drowned
the virus in ivermectin, presumably in whatever cell culture
they were growing it in. But I would be amazed if any of
those studies deliberately included cell parasites in the
medium, so that ivermectin’s knocking them out would affect
the ability of some unrelated virus to replicate in cells that
perhaps that parasite doesn’t even touch.</div>
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<div>Again, of course, in the world where, as Masha Gessen says
of the cynical society under autocracies, “Anything is
possible and nothing is true”, the fact that ivermectin is
claimed to be antiviral at drowning doses in vitro with no
parasites, and then by coincidence the same drug is claimed to
be antiviral at doses many orders of magnitude smaller in
people in countries where you have a lot less ability to
referee study methods if you don’t live there, but where there
could be different parasites, makes this connection completely
comme il faut </div>
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<div>We know that at some sufficiently strong concentration,
ethanol, and I assume either vinegar or baking-soda solution,
will also be antiviral against almost anything. (Whether
vinegar or baking soda will depend on whether capsule
denaturation is acid-catalyzed or base-catalyzed, but probably
it will be one or the other.) But of course, we know why you
can’t get to those concentrations in a live animal. That just
isn’t interesting, because there isn’t anything singular about
it. The obscure drugs are singular, particularly if they are
“anti parasitical”, given the above comment about how delicate
a matter it can be to clear something that is phylogenetically
not so far from you.</div>
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<div>Btw, the use of “parasite” in pharmacology again makes the
hair on the back of my neck stand up. What _kind_ of
parasite? Protists and predatory lenders? Bacteria and
fungi? Tapeworms? I feel like, for any of these drugs that
do actually have some efficacy, there is probably a more
specific word for what they cover that could be used, and
would aid in guessing-games about their likely off-label
scope. When efficacy is real, and against classes of things
that really don’t have much in common, that becomes even more
interesting. </div>
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<div>Eric</div>
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