Hacker News Reader

Comment by ustamills | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that the "tonic" in "Gin & Tonic" ?

It's an analogue of quinine, which tonic water nowadays may contain varying (quite small) amounts of, depending on brand etc.

G&Ts almost certainly won't have any effect on your susceptibility to infection nor your prognosis once infected. But they might help with (or make worse?) the anxiety associated with the panic.

Tonic water can contain up to 83mg/L actual quinine. Three 2L bottles of tonic water could get you 500mg, a therapeutic dose of quinine. Unfortunately, I have not found any place that manufacturers note how much quinine is in their tonic water.

Yeah, I remember reading something similar years ago. But I suspect with the proliferation of "craft tonic water" there may be some "flavours" that don't contain quinine at all.

And 6L of tonic water is... quite a lot.

I read somewhere that gin & tonic was invented because they needed the gin to cover up the taste of the quinine, since the tonic needed to have a _lot_ of quinine to be effective.

Shudder.

Yeah, I think something related to the British navy?

Here's a decent article on the history of gin and tonic: http://activehistory.ca/2012/08/gin-and-tonic-a-short-histor...

As someone who has taken uncoated chloroquine tablets mumble years ago, the taste is one of the most foul bitter over-riding tastes one will ever encounter. No amount of sugar mixed in with it took the edge off the taste. The only thing that did it was when they coated the tablets, preventing the chloroquine from touching the tongue.

A surprising amount of medicines have this incredibly foul taste. I was forced to take oseltamivir during the H1N1 epidemic, and I had to share a pill once (two of my siblings needed a half dose). It tasted so incredibly bitter and just mouth-wrenching

The worst taste experience I ever had was when I accidentally bit down on an ibuprofen gel cap before swallowing it with a small mouthful of room temperature coffee (it was all I had at my office desk). Wow... it instantly numbed the back of my mouth and throat and tasted like volatile chemical waste. I washed it all down as fast as I could with more coffee but that taste and tingly sensation stuck around for 20 minutes.

The ibuprofen did its job though.

6L is about 2200 calories worth of sugar if you're drinking Schweppes, so it might cause other complications :)

You can boil it down presumably. Probably won’t taste very good though.

(I do not recommend this and am not a doctor)

Sounds like a ware of time when you can buy tonic syrup and mix it to your own strength.

You can also buy quinine pills online.

That'd need at least 2L gin to wash it down with though, which could be problematic depending on the frequency of your 500mg prescription.

challenge accepted.

I propose a new cocktail consisting of one part gin, three parts tonic, 200 mg hydroxychloroquine plus ice and a slice. Call it a Corona Cocktail maybe. Job done.

Be careful - an overdose of quinine can cause cinchonism, which has some unpleasant symptoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinchonism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com