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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that chloroquine, an old anti malarial drug is "highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro". I wonder if anyone's doing a study to see if that stops it spreading in the real world? I almost thought I could do a double blind study myself with a website and a bunch of chloroquine pills and aspirins and randomly post volunteers one or the other. Dunno if the post works in Wuhan though. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0.pdf

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Not a biologist, but "in vitro" isn't really that informative. Many things, including fire, are highly effective in stopping diseases in vitro.

https://xkcd.com/1217/

This is also the origin of the whole "alcohol kills brain cells" myth.

Not really a myth. Alcohol depletes vitamin B12, eventually causing Korsikoff syndrome aka "wet brain"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korsakoff_syndrome Korsakoff syndrome - Wikipedia

>Chloroquine is widely distributed in the whole body, including lung, after oral administration.

Can't say that about fire.

You could say that about vodka though. It'll definitely kill the virus are in a petri dish, but maybe won't work as well in the body.

2 infected in Russia seems to confirm what you say. ;-)

But it probably won't kill the virus in the petri dish at the same concentrations found in the body. The chloroquine did.

Chloroquine can have serious long-term side effects. This is not something you should attempt lightly or without a substantial fund for compensating the volunteers for the damage to their health.

I guess but I think that's for use over several months. The risks for one month seem low.

Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?

Drink tonic water. Quinine’s close enough.

I now have a good explanation for the boss why I'm drinking gin & tonics at work..

James Burke covered this in Connections² : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yLa_IrAj-o

Connections was- and probably still is- my favorite show I've ever seen. I watched it when I was very young and it really shaped my view on the world and helped me learn to love history and the stories in it.

Also made me realize that originality and ownership of ideas is way more complicated than i'd thought.

You would have to drink about two liters of tonic water a day to consume a day’s dose of quinine in pill form. Which is doable, but exposes you to quinine side effects.

Antimalarial compounds quinine, chloroquine and mefloquine affect the electrophysiological properties of Cys-loop receptors and have structural similarities to 5-HT3 receptor antagonists. So they might act at 5-HT3 receptors.

In 2006, the FDA banned sale of unapproved drugs containing quinine because of the risk of serious side effects or death.

Careful to avoid the symptoms of hysteria.

When a building is burning, often, people's first reaction is to ignore the alarm and carry on with what they were doing. The first people to leave look like worry-warts. Those who make it out, though, are the ones who think for themselves and realize there is a problem, before the herd stampedes. Insurance is cheap before there's a problem, but impossible to get after. What is my "cost" and "risk" from having chloroquine? I'll probably never take it, so almost nothing. What is my upside? Maybe nothing, maybe everything.

I hear a lot of "it is just the flu." Maybe. The Spanish Flu was horrific, though. And when was the last time a city the size of london was quarantined for the flu?

I believe in data-driven fear. Care to go over the data?

Yeah though chloroquine is fairly mild stuff - they used to give it to all travellers going to malarial places but have mostly stopped because malaria mostly became resistant. I'm not a medic but reading the letter to nature I'd put the odds of it protecting you in real life at say 50/50 so if you're getting exposed it could be a reasonable risk reward. Even if it didn't stop infection it could make the illness less severe.

I avoid touching my face, stay away from crowds (not that I didn't before, hah!), cough / sneeze into tissue / handkerchiefs, wash my hands properly and have a bottle of sanitizer at all times.

I might need more measures if I was in the middle of Wuhan (or even just feeling ill, I guess) but frankly where I am it feels like any additional steps would be done out of fear, not reason.

I could probably send you one as the start of my experiment.

Count me in! I am first initial (which you can see in my username) followed by "beland" on google's email service.

Finally a disease I could claim gin and tonic are the cure for. Pops open tonic bottle, pours gin deliberately

In vitro means nothing for clinical use

Well the letter to Nature concludes

> Since these compounds have been used in human patients with a safety track record and shown to be effective against various ailments, we suggest that they should be assessed in human patients suffering from the novel coronavirus disease.

ie. give it a try

Update:

I looked into doing a diy trial but some issues and the docs are on to it:

>A third drug, known as chloroquine, used to treat malaria, is being tested against coronavirus in China, the Times reported. https://nypost.com/2020/02/14/doctors-attempt-to-battle-coro... also 18 trials: http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=chloroquine...

So I guess I'll leave 'em to it and see how that works out.

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