Latest mind-bending "Years Of Lead" update from Italy's @Annibal97783312.
Hacks in this country get their undies in a bunch if someone so much as suggests people do weird dark shit for power. Italian culture doesn't suffer from our provincial hangups https://t.co/hpp2mJISNY

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) February 12, 2020

Q: Can you explain what chloroquine is?

It's a very old medicine. It's probably the most used medicine - alongside aspirin - in the history of humanity. Younger people don't know it because it's known only as an antimalarial. People who have lived in Africa like myself have taken chloroquine daily. Everyone who visits these hot countries take it for their entire trip, and every day for two months after their return. There are millions of people who have taken this medicine. And it costs nothing: 10 cents a tablet. It's a medicine that is extremely reliable, and cheaper than our wildest dreams. So it's super good news. Everybody who understands these benefits should jump on it.

Q: Some scientists are less enthusiastic than you on the benefits of using chloroquine for coronavirus, for example Professor Astrid Vabret in Sciences et Avenir...

I don't care about people spreading rumours. I'm not interested. My focus has been infectious diseases for 40 years. I feel obligated, and I believe it is now necessary, to communicate that which I know - not some opinions - about research on infectious diseases. After that -- what you do with it, I'm not a prophet. I don't care. I'm trying to be as clear as possible. When someone shows that a medicine works on 100 people when the entire world is about to have a nervous breakdown, and there are some idiots who say they aren't sure if it works, I'm not interested!

Q: Are you going to use chloroquine at the IHU (University Hospital Insititute) to treat coronavirus?

Chinese scientists are very serious people. They aren't clowns. And they have shown that chloroquine works. It would be malpractice, honestly, to not prescribe chloroquine in the case of coronavirus. It doesn't make sense. Let's be serious. Tomorrow, you start coughing. You have coronavirus and a fever of 40C. And some people tell you "you know, I don't believe in using chloroquine to treat coronavirus" ... what do you do?

At the IHU, we have put into place a therapeutic protocol. What we do is treat diseases. There are people who come in with a serious disease, and it's been shown that the only treatment for this disease is chloroquine. So to not give chloroquine, you'd have to be full of it! So we will be notifying the minister that if people who arrive have a coronavirus, we will be treating them with chloroquine because it is the only treatment which has been demonstrated to work. That's it! It's not mysterious, it's medicine, not TV gossip!

(edit: I wrote "medical error" where it should have said "malpractice". I think. Fixed.)

Edited by drwhat (Feb. 27, 2020 15:06:53)

Petrol posted:

i was planning to drink a lot of g&t anyway. at least the gin, that's good enough right

it doesn't work without the quinine in the tonic water!!! do not troll me like this !!

ialdabaoth posted:

folks tonic water does not contain anywhere near a theraputic dose, y'all going to need dytd levels of g&t. talking about 4+ liters of just tonic daily

and?

"Game over!" for the Covid-19 epidemic? That's the title of an attention-getting announcement by Prof. Dr. Didier Raoult, Director of the Mediterranean Infections University-Hospital Institute (Institut hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée-Infections) of Marseille, a video published February 25th, 2020 by the prestigious research centre. The source of this news: two Chinese publications that unveiled the potential of a long-known antimalarial, chloroquine, to accelerate the recovery of patients affected by the new coronavirus. "It has been demonstrated that chloroquine phosphate, a classic medication for the treatment of malaria, has apparent efficacy and acceptable safety against Covid-19-associated pneumonia in the series of multi-centric clinical trials undertaken in China," wrote a team of pharmacologists at the University Hospital of Qingdao (Shandong Province, China). If Covid-19 is benign in 85% of cases, a treatment like this would allow the focusing of resources on the moderate and severe cases. The researchers cited multiple trials across ten Chinese hospitals encompassing 100 patients in total - a quite limited sample.

Chloroquine vs. coronavirus: clinical data still limited

It is necessary to continue to evaluate the efficacy of chloroquine, but a consensus of experts recommended the addition of chloroquine phosphate to the recommendations of patient care in China, at the rate of 500mg twice daily for 10 days. The benefit of this strategy is that the antimalarial is immediately available and inexpensive. This is a drug that has been around for a long time. Despite this, Raoult's announcement has been strongly criticized by a number of French doctors and scientists on social networks for its lack of balance. Indeed, clinical data is still limited, and the use of chloroquine can cause potentially serious side effects.

Chloroquine: recommended dosage and side effects

In an interview with Sciences et Avenir, Didier Raoult swept aside the criticisms. "In our team, we've used chloroquine for a long time to treat certain bacterial infections. Some of our patients were treated for two years, even. We understand the potential side-effects. Moreover, we must begin to take Chinese scientists seriously - in particular, the virologists, who are among the best in the world."

In the case at hand, two risks associated with chloroquine are known from past experience. The first is retinopathy, which can even lead to blindness in some cases, though this risk is associated with long-term use of the drug over multiple years. In the case of Covid-19, it would suffice to treat patients for a dozen days. "However, 500mg twice daily is definitely a serious dose," admits Dr. Raoult. The other adverse reaction is that of well-documented acute poisoning, potentially triggering cardiac or respiratory problems. The recommended dose by the Chinese researchers is near the risk zone (do not exceed 20mg/kg/day, e.g. 1200mg for a 60kg (132lb) person, 1500mg for 75kg (165lb) person, according to Vidal [a national drug reference guide in France.])

Towards a clinical trial of chloroquine on coronavirus in France?

"We get the same old soap opera about using chloroquine as an antiviral every time a virus emerges," says Prof. Astrid Vabret, head of the virology department of the University Hospital Centre of Caen. "We know that it works well in vitro on viruses with viral envelopes like the new coronavirus, but clinical data remains very limited." Out of the question, then, to rush to this medicine.

But Didier Raoult responds: "We want to set up a clinical trial in France to test chloroquine on patients infected with already-known coronaviruses which circulate each year in France - despite the fact that nobody really cares about them. You know, since the beginning of the year, we have diagnosed 500 patients with these other coronaviruses, two of whom have died? It's cases like these that I want to be trying this strategy out on."

It's true: four strains of coronavirus already circulate each year in France. "It is important to realize that the panic is always much more dangerous than the virus," insists Raoult. "This new coronavirus does not really merit us panicking. I continue to say that, like other seasonal viruses, there's a strong chance that it will disappear by springtime. At worst, instead of having 13 viruses that give us seasonal infections, we'll have 14. But I doubt that that would make a significant difference in over-winter mortality rates."

The French Health Minister, Olivier Véran, assures that he has spoken repeatedly with Didier Raoult: "He's shared his observations and the several studies which he's highlighted, and I have passed those along to the Directorate-General of Health which will be doing some analysis."

Edited by drwhat (Feb. 29, 2020 17:04:50)

ialdabaoth posted:

just rememreb to include tidepods in your dyad posts so i know your legit

trakfactri posted:

Info on this group: https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/clarion_fund/

Yeah we’ve had some fun with them, they’re the people responsible for the psycho holy-war training videos local governments use to build cop brains nowadays

tears posted:

vimingok posted:

For some reason this video was the top recommendation for the one I just posted. There was an nyt thing last year about an ex-altright guy and now there's him and many more to come I'm sure. What I don't understand is why this is supposed to be interesting or significant enough to warrant nyt articles

what an inexplicable thing

The line seems to be right wing youtube pundits are 'radicalising' them but alt-right is a ruthlessly honest (=dumbed down) version of white liberalism which I imagine is pretty useless to real fascist politics. ICE guards aren't alt-right.