[FRIAM] ivermectin, nope

Sat Aug 21 17:22:31 EDT 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/mississippi-ivermectin-covid-surge-livestock/

State Epidemiologist Paul Byers warned that “at least 70 percent of the
> recent calls” to poison

> control have been related to the ingestion of ivermectin “purchased at
> livestock supply centers.”

-- rec --

On Sun, Aug 15, 2021 at 8:28 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> Eric -
>
> I understand Hydroxychloroquine to have been used widely in developing
> (equatorial) countries as an antiviral (in particular Malaria) \
>
> Not antiviral, Steve.  Plasmodium isn’t even a bacterium; it is a
> protozoan.  One of us, gooble gobble.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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).
>
> 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).
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128816/
>
> 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?
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe <http://bit.ly/virtualfriamun/subscribe> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210821/f9d2a4b6/attachment.html>