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 <sasm...@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/ >
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