“Experts’ have cautioned against usage of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, by those with Caronavirus virus symptoms …
People have been given the drugs. by doctors and hospitals anyways once Trump mentioned them….Their effect long term could cause other problems…
With a vaccine maybe a year to 18 months away?
These moves should come as no surprise…
There have only been a few, very small anecdotal studies that show a possible benefit of the drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, to relieve the acute respiratory symptoms of Covid-19 and clear the virus from infected patients.
And health experts warn the drugs’ well-known side effects could become more commonplace with much wider use. In particular, they say, patients with existing heart problems or taking certain drugs, such as anti-depressants that affect heart rhythm, are at risk of a fatal episode. Experts recommend screening before the drugs are prescribed to prevent drug-related deaths.
“The concern really is if we’re talking millions of patients, then this issue of drug-induced sudden cardiac death is absolutely going to rear its ugly head,’’ said Michael Ackerman, a pediatric cardiologist and professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, who last week co-authored a key paper about the risks in response to the surge in drugs’ use.
Long-term use of the drugs also is associated with a chance of developing a form of vision loss called retinopathy, but the use of the drugs to fight virus in an infected patient is only for a few days.
The FDA’s emergency authorization does not cover longer-term use of the drugs to prevent the coronavirus infection, a practice that has become more commonplace as doctors have prescribed the drugs “off label” in response to the pandemic….
Update…
New study from China with promising results for speeder recoveries of MILD corona virus cases using hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine….
The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine helped to speed the recovery of a small number of patients who were mildly ill from the coronavirus, doctors in China reported this week.
Cough, fever and pneumonia went away faster, and the disease seemed less likely to turn severe in people who received hydroxychloroquine than in a comparison group not given the drug. The authors of the report said that the medication was promising, but that more research was needed to clarify how it might work in treating coronavirus disease and to determine the best way to use it.
“It’s going to send a ripple of excitement out through the treating community,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
The study was small and limited to patients who were mildly or moderately ill, not severe cases. Like many reports about the coronavirus, it was posted at medRxiv, an online server for medical articles, before undergoing peer review by other researchers…
….
With no proven treatment for the coronavirus, many hospitals have simply been giving hydroxychloroquine to patients, reasoning that it might help and probably will not hurt, because it is relatively safe….
For those who thought I did NOT know what I was talking about when I have said here that despite the media saying Trump’s malaria drug should NOT be given to people…Doctors and hospital WHERE prescribing the stuff?
…“I think it could be something really incredible,” Mr. Trump said on March 19, noting that while more study was needed, the two drugs had shown “very, very encouraging results” in treating the virus.
By that evening, first-time prescriptions of the drugs — chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — poured into retail pharmacies at more than 46 times the rate of the average weekday, according to an analysis of prescription data by The New York Times. And the nearly 32,000 prescriptions came from across the spectrum — rheumatologists, cardiologists, dermatologists, psychiatrists and even podiatrists, the data shows….
More…
Add people with PhD’s to the list of those that WILL follow almost ANYTHING the big guy says…
This just doubles up my view, expressed here , that Doctor’s are human beings like the rest of us and they , as ‘experts’ are NOT always right or sensible…
Doctors are people just like us!
Woe!Im glad you told us!
What’s your point?
No one ever said they weren’t!
What was said by some is that they are much more “expert” that the likes of you and this silliness confirms it.