People Tried to Self-Medicate After Trump Touted Chloroquine - The Intercept

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People Tried to Self-Medicate After Trump Touted Chloroquine - The Intercept Posted: 24 Mar 2020 03:33 AM PDT The Swiss drug company Novartis and Israel's Teva Pharmaceutical Industries also plan to donate millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets. Another drug maker, Mylan said it would restart production of hydroxychloroquine at its West Virginia manufacturing facility to meet the potential for increased demand. At the same news conference, Trump also downplayed warnings from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top immunologist, who said that even though the drug is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, without large scale, randomized clinical trials, it was not yet possible to be sure that chloroquine was effective or safe for people suffering from Covid-19, the pandemic respiratory illness. While chloroquine was only rarely dangerous for people with malaria, Fauci said, "what we don't know, is when you put it in the context of another disease, whether it's safe." "We're trying to strike a balance," Fauci said, "between making something with a potential of an effect to the American people available, at the same time that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it's truly safe and truly effective." On Saturday, Trump ignored that caution and tweeted that a combination therapy of hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, and the antibiotic azithromycin — which was administered to six patients who recovered from Covid-19 this month in France — has "a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine." "The president is talking about hope for people," Fauci said when asked about the tweet at a briefing on Saturday. "My job, as a scientist," he added, "is to ultimately prove, without a doubt, that a drug is not only safe by that it actually works." The preliminary research touted by Trump was conducted by Professor Didier Raoult, a French virologist who directs the Mediterranean Infectious and Tropical Disease Institute in Marseille. According to a non-peer-reviewed draft paper posted online last week, Raoult and his colleagues began treating 26 Covid-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine earlier this month. After six days, 14 of them "were virologicaly cured," including six who were also treated with azithromycin, compared to just two of a control group of 16 patients who did not get the drugs. Raoult's claim that the study proves the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19 has been questioned for its very small size and some odd choices in how it was conducted. Then there is the fact that six of the patients treated with hydroxychloroquine had adverse reactions within three days: one died, three were removed from the study when they were transferred to intensive care, one tested negative for the virus and one stopped the treatment because of nausea. Those failures were simply dropped from the study's statistics. The Centers for Disease Control described Raoult's work as "a small study" that reported "hydroxychloroquine alone or in combination with azithromycin reduced detection of" the coronavirus "in upper respiratory tract specimens compared with a non-randomized control group but did not assess clinical benefit." As Matthew Herper of Stat News explained, "three-quarters of the time, medicines against infectious disease that looked promising in small studies either were ineffective or had side effects that made them unusable" after larger clinical trials. Raoult, a self-described maverick who bears a passing resemblance to Dr. Harold Bornstein, Trump's former personal physician, based his work on research done in China earlier this year. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory reported that hydroxychloroquine can inhibit infections of the novel coronavirus in lab conditions. As the CDC notes, the researchers in China "reported that chloroquine treatment of Covid-19 patients had clinical and virologic benefit versus a comparison group," which led to the drug being recommended as an antiviral treatment there. According to the French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur, while he is the most influential microbiologist in France, Raoult's outsized personality and love of a fight colors how his work is perceived by peers and public health officials. A climate change denier, he has scoffed at the global response to the pandemic, saying the virus "does not justify measures worthy of an atomic catastrophe." His scorn for this sort of approach to pandemics is not new. Epidemic modelers, like those whose work prompted the current shutdown of public life in the United Kingdom and the United States, are "charlatans," he told Science magazine in 2012. "There are zero examples in infectious diseases of something that has been predicted by a model," he added. Raoult even has a new book about the coronavirus out this week, "Epidemics, Real Dangers and False Alarms," in which he argues that "this panic is largely due to the exaggerations of the press, which knows that fear 'sells.'" Rather than universal confinement, Raoult suggests, a better response would be to emulate South Korea — and Germany — by ramping up testing so much that infected individuals can be identified and isolated, cutting the death toll. As the Irish Times correspondent Lara Marlowe noted, Raoult "shares a certain arrogance with Trump" and Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, who ordered the nation's army to produce mass quantities of chloroquine on Saturday. "In my field, I am a star, worldwide," he told the newspaper La Provence. "I don't give a damn what others think. I am not an outsider. I'm streaks ahead of the others." Like Trump and Bolsonaro, Raoult also scoffs at predictions of climate catastrophe and is a less-than-stellar boss. A dozen subordinates in the institute he runs signed a letter of complaint in 2017 saying they were "frequently belittled, mocked, humiliated, subjected to macho talk, inappropriate attitudes and verbal altercations." A video interview posted on his institute's YouTube channel begins with Raoult boasting of his high-ranking on a website called Expertscape. Still, Trump and Bolsonaro are not the only people anxious to find out if chloroquine might work. On Sunday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York announced that the state had obtained 750,000 doses of chloroquine, 70,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine and 10,000 doses of azithromycin and would undertake its own drug trial. Amid reports that the drug is already being hoarded, Cuomo issued an executive order on Monday barring any experimental use of the drug outside state-approved trials. "No pharmacist shall dispense hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine except when written as prescribed for an FDA-approved indication; or as part of a state approved clinical trial related to Covid-19 for a patient who has tested positive for Covid-19, with such test result documented as part of the prescription," the order said. "No other experimental or prophylactic use shall be permitted, and any permitted prescription is limited to one fourteen day prescription with no refills." Nevan Krogan, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who is studying possible drug treatments for Covid-19 told The New York Times that doctors "need to be careful" with chloroquine because the drug seems to target many human cellular proteins and could have many toxic side effects. On Sunday, Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gave an interview to Science magazine in which he described the difficulty of keeping Trump from saying things that are not true during briefings. "I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down," Fauci said. On Sunday night, the government's most senior immunologist was attacked on Fox News by Steve Hilton, a former adviser to David Cameron, the British prime minister who introduced sweeping austerity measures. Hilton, who supported massive cuts to social programs in Britain when he was in government, accused Fauci and other public health officials of "pushing us towards another Great Depression."

Stock food and water supplies in preparation for emergencies - Tifton Gazette Posted: 19 Mar 2020 11:00 AM PDT News of the coronavirus has many people feeling uneasy and helpless. Building a supply of emergency food and water will help ease some of the stress and help Georgians prepare for any kind of emergency, be it a medical quarantine, a snowstorm or a major power outage, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension experts say. "Flash floods, tropical storms, blizzards, whatever the disaster — it pays to be prepared," said UGA Extension food safety specialist Elizabeth Andress. "Every family should have at least a three-day emergency food supply to fall back on. If you are concerned about virus quarantine, you should plan on a two-week supply according to our public health agencies." Natural disasters, or the slim chance your family is quarantined by the coronavirus, will prevent you from shopping for supplies. The size of your personal emergency food supply depends on the size of your family and home storage area. Select non-perishable foods that do not require refrigeration, little or no cooking, and little or no water for natural disasters. For quarantine, you can plan on having your utilities. "Chances are, if you're in an emergency situation, you aren't going to have the luxuries of electricity and running water," Andress said. Include ready-to-eat canned meats, fruits and vegetables. Select containers that can be used in one meal or snack, since you most likely won't be able to refrigerate leftovers. Add canned juices, soups and canned or powdered milk. Include bottled water for drinking and extra water for mixing powdered milk and diluting the soups. Supply enough fluids (milk, juice, water, etc.) so each family member has at least one gallon per day. "A person who's normally active needs to drink at least two quarts of water each day, but hot environments can double that amount," she said. Include staple foods, like sugar, salt and pepper, too, and high energy foods like peanut butter, jelly, granola bars and trail mix. "Don't forget to throw in some comfort foods like cookies, hard candy, sweetened cereals, and instant coffee and tea," Andress said. When stocking your emergency supply, remember to include food items specifically for infants or elderly family members. Don't forget to include a hand-operated can opener, scissors and a knife for opening foods in foil or plastic pouches. Add disposable plates, cups and utensils, too. Be sure to date items and make a list of dates when items need to be rotated out. Canned foods can last two years, but for best quality, use them within one year, Andress said. Powdered milk may be stored 12 to 24 months. Use most other foods within one year, or rotate them out. Over time, replace any rusty, leaky, dented or bulging food cans. Place your emergency supply items together in a box and store it in a cool, dry place. Dry supplies should be stored above floor level. If an emergency causes a power outage, Andress says to use any perishable items from your refrigerator first. Next, use foods from your freezer and then begin using your emergency supply. "Eat refrigerated foods like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, cheeses, deli items and leftovers only if they have not been above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours," she said. "Discard them if the power is off for more than four hours." Condiments like jelly, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise last a little longer, she said. "Eat frozen foods only if they have ice crystals remaining or if the temperature of the freezer has remained at 40 F or below," Andress said. "Covering the freezer with blankets will help to hold in the cold. Be sure to pin blankets back so that the air vent is not covered." For information from UGA Extension and UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences on how to compile short- and long-term emergency food supplies, go to https://t.uga.edu/3wB.

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