Harnessing the benefits of UVA light treatment in Covid-19 patients | Hacker News Reader

Harnessing the benefits of UVA light treatment in Covid-19 patients

healtheuropa.eu

39 pointsrgrieselhuber80 comments

Some important context to actually evaluate the benefits, from the published article [1]:

- Only five patients were enrolled, median age 56 years.

- One of them died, so 20% mortality in the study group. We can't conclude anything from such a small sample size, of course.

- No causal link can be established at this stage between viral burden and clinical improvement, nor between treatment and viral burden.

In other words, this is just a study to check that UVA light can be further studied without killing patients left and right, and apparently it can. It isn't able to draw conclusions about the efficacy of the treatment.

1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12325-021-01830-7

Wasn’t there a vitamin that humans produce when exposed to UV light that seemed to make the chance of getting infected a lot smaller? But hey, that’s not expensive patented unavailable medication.

There is strong evidence that vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor for severe COVID-19. However inserting a UV light in the lungs will not stimulate vitamin D production.

https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/

I sincerely doubt anyone has ever tested whether inserting a UV light in the lungs will stimulate vitamin D production.

Visit https://mobile.twitter.com/healight_news for the latest updates, clinical trials & health expert coverage of the innovative Healight™ Internal UV Light Therapy medical device invented by the MAST Program at Cedars Sinai & globally licensed through Aytu BioPharma.

Lung sunburn! Pardon me while i go scream for a minnit on that thought. I'd rather smoke oak again.

Once unsquicked; it sounds like it might be a little better than ventilator damage and is a lot easier to control so that "burn" shouldn't actually happen.

To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

> To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

Why?

to put a stick in the eye of the person eager to jump up with copypasta about how we should be focusing on vaccines instead of other treatments, the response about how all the "treatments" offered so far are scams, the political follow ons, and so on.

Not that those people don't exist, but the whole "I bet those people are going to have this reaction" is just as much political bickering (and therefore conversation poison) as the behavior your predicting.

Misinformation is a topic of recent increased interest so citing it will likely bring more engagement.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

It's a fair question considering that's been a de facto rule on social media, despite people using code words to get around that.

But I am not sure that was ever the case here on HN, so I don't know why they used the word "still".

Here is some fuel for your flamewar: this is the exact treatment Trump was riffing off of when the media collectively lost its mind and claimed that he told people to drink bleach.

It's really frustrating to see actual medical progress be pushed back in the public eye because some people have such intense dislike for someone.

"Some guy we hate said this might work - quick, write a thousand articles about how he's not smart for recommending it and bring on doctors who have no relevant experience/knowledge/credentials to 'prove them wrong'!"

This UV-A treatment looks very promising for people who have contracted a severe case of the virus. I do like how they're optimizing the UV light to try and find the best wavelength/frequency/etc. of light to avoid any unnecessary harm to the patient. It looks like from what I was reading that ventilators can cause harm to patients? I wasn't aware that was a thing!

Ventilators are nasty. Lots better than death, but they don't use them until that's the alternative for really good reasons.

The "does hydroxychloroquine work, does ivermectin work" are all valid questions. The problem is people making big conclusions on tiny studies that didn't stand up to larger statistical trials - just as we're seeing here - and also the fact that people refused to drop it once the evidence contradicted their positions.

I find the "horse paste" and "aquarium cleaner" memes to be very irritating though, they are FDA approved drugs. Yes, it hasn't gone through the human-medicine supply chain, but veterinary medicine needs to be just as pure as human medicine. Also, "aquarium cleaner" and other products are often sold wink-nudge with the tacit understanding that there are a lot of people who don't have health insurance (or have health insurance that's terrible) and can't get access to actual drugs and this is the only way for them to get access to life-saving medications. There are people who literally need to take "aquarium cleaner" to live, because they have lupus and that's what they can get. Same for "fish mox" which is routinely taken by people who can't afford to go to a doctor and get actual amoxicillin. In both cases, it needs to be very pure, if there were contaminants it would instantly kill exotic fish, just like veterinary medicine needs to be pure, contaminants will kill your dog or horse the same as a human.

Like it or not that's a grey-market supply chain that has existed for a while and nobody wants to actually address the problem of making sure that people have universal access to medical care (not just insurance, that's not sufficient as you can see right now). So people take aquarium cleaner to stay alive. Welcome to America.

The problem there is people self-administering huge doses that are far out of clinical standards. And that's something I'm perfectly fine mocking - if you are gonna self-prescribe for something the drug is not approved for, and you take a massive dose that makes you uncontrollably shit yourself, yeah that one's on you buddy. And that would happen even if they sourced human drugs from a pharmacy.

The problem as far as messaging is that the above stuff doesn't sink in with the general public. They won't listen to "the evidence says HCQ and ivermectin don't work", Republicans say it does, and they will trust Trump over doctors. But there's a chance they will listen if they get constantly mocked for taking horse paste. As far as messaging, it's probably the correct strategy even if we here all know it's not intellectually honest.

And yeah the FDA has gotten themselves in trouble with mixed messaging in the past, like saying the evidence showed that masks didn't work, in order to manipulate the public into not buying them to preserve the supply for health care providers (lmao at the idea of that ever working, and lmao that they thought they could pull it off without destroying their credibility). In this case mocking people for taking horse paste isn't really wrong though, it's a flat-out bad idea and if this is the approach that wakes them up, oh well.

Intellectually irritating but I get it. I'm not the target audience here.

> Sounds interesting — right and then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?

Fair enough. He suggested that injecting bleach could be a good idea.

No he didn’t, read the full quote in context.

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning" sounds a lot like injecting disinfectant. I admit the original, rambling, confused and barely coherent reduced-vocabulary speech can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, some of which aren't insane, but this is Donnie we are talking about.

That is cherry picked from 2 full paragraphs of context, I posted it in another comment above, check my history.

I copied it out of your quote. It's there, right in the middle of his confused flow of thought. What is your interpretation? Is he still talking about light when he mentions the injection right after the disinfectant?

He's comparing the light to the disenfectant, and intrigued by the idea of "injecting" the light to do the same job that a disenfectant does on a surface.

"so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of *the light*, the way *it kills it in one minute*."

I mean, the comprehension here is not that difficult.

Maybe you need to brush up on your "Queens-speak Translator".

"And then I see the disinfectant" is a very strange construction to refer to the effect of light, but you are entitled to "your truth" it seems, at least according to the current doublethink norms the GOP follows.

Not a republican, but I find the insult ironic because "your truth" is something that radical liberals use to justify their own doublethink.

> Not a republican, but I find the insult ironic because "your truth" is something that radical liberals use to justify their own doublethink.

"I'm not a republican" ... "radical liberals justifying your doublethink..."

hmmmmmm

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

yes, extremely definitely not a republican, we can definitely tell because you said so right at the start, and it's not like people would just go on the internet and pretend to be moderates, knowing that "moderation" is a trait that many people inherently assume to be credible and balanced.

if you're gonna try to pull the "well ackshually I'm a moderate" you gotta try and sell it a little better, don't immediately leap right to the fox news political slurs in literally the same sentence as you try to frame yourself as a moderate. Kinda gives away the game a bit.

I find it surprising that Fox News political slurs are showing up even here.

You’re leaving out so much context I can’t believe you are acting in good faith.

Full quote:

"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?"

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."

It’s pretty clear he is referring to the uva as the “injected disenfectant” here.

That's not clear, and even reading it now I didn't think of that interpretation without you pointing it out.

UVA is a disinfectant now? To me it’s clear he’s listing things he’s heard and UVA and disinfectant are unrelated topics of discussion.

The ridicule heaped on him was not about him mentioning things that were discussed around him. It’s that he clearly had a very weak grasp of what was being discussed and couldn’t then clearly communicate that and ended up sounding completely incompetent.

The phrase “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” exists for a reason.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181017211703.h...

Since you're concerned with context, they'd previously been discussing actual disinfectant. The slide is pictured in the BBC's coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177

> "COMMONLY AVAILALBLE DISINFECTANTS (Bleach & Isopropyl Alcohol) work to kill the virus"

Vaccine is not treatment. Both have a role.

It's followed by an Aloe Vera chaser.

> To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

No, only if the discussions on other treatments are done without misinformation and some basis on science.

For example, it would be good if you didn't say things like "it sounds like it might be a little better than ventilator damage" when there's no data to back that up, and there's a major difference: ventilators help people stay alive. Even if the UVA treatment worked, you still need something to support patients when their oxygen saturation is dangerously low.

How does one discuss a complex topic with others without some degree of misinformation being present in the conversation?

Some degree of misinformation will always happen, of course. But there's a lot of difference between "I heard that the vaccine changes your DNA, is that right?" and "The vaccine is untested and made to control you, meanwhile ivermectin is fully effective against COVID and the doctors are lying to you".

> No, only if the discussions on other treatments are done without misinformation and some basis on science.

And who defines what is misinformation?

Well, it's pretty easy to spot which information is not exactly right, what is unknown, and what is outright false.

It's not that difficult. Somehow the misinformation discussion gets derailed into "but what is actually the truth" empty debates, when the misinformation we are discussing is as stupidly false as "COVID is fake" or "vaccines don't work" for example.

> To kick off the flamewar: is discussing any treatment but vaccines still == "spreading anti-vax misinformation"?

Saying that a test with 5 patients of whom one didn’t survive has benefits to be harnessed is misinformation. All it indicates is that it may be possible to reduce viral load by exposing internal tissue to UVA light and that the treatment doesn’t seem to kill patients immediately.

Let’s see if they can do it with more patients and show some statistically significant results.

>Lung sunburn! Pardon me while i go scream for a minnit on that thought.

Ever thought about chemo or radiation therapy?

My lungs itch already. "sunburn itch" and glow ... ugh

Not to start a political off topic war, but the then sitting president of the US was heavily mocked for suggesting treatment options with UV be evaluated. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/health/sunlight-coronavir...

Yep, same thing with calling ivermectin horse medicine instead of representing it accurately, a nobel prize winning medicine of which billions of doses have been safely administred to humans.

Good journalism is hard to find nowadays. But journalism infested with politics is worse, and so widespread nowadays.

I rarely (maybe never?) saw any journalist say that all ivermectin is horse medicine. However, people did take horse medicine because of the similarly irresponsible use of ivermectin as another weird political side-taking thing, the same way people bought UV products to use on themselves or ingested disinfectant. So, I think the criticism is mostly fair.

Bunch of articles on CNN... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/21/us/mississippi-poison-con... for instance.

I'm aware of this article. She says "they're taking something called Ivermectin, which is an anti-parasite drug for horses", which isn't the whole story, but is also a reasonable sentence, since they were in fact taking a horse medicine called ivermectin and the same article explicitly states that there are human formulations and you can take those if your doctor prescribes them. So, I think it's unfair to use this as evidence of your assertion, or as rationale for the broader, usually politically-motivated bitterness about the media. I'm sure you could find some example of an article I haven't seen that committed the sin you claim, especially from somewhere as biased as CNN, but I would only have to take back the "maybe never?" part of my statement, and it may reasonably still stand.

https://twitter.com/us_fda/status/1429050070243192839 how about the FDA?

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1448637553129648129?ref...

Fauci/Acosta on CNN

Joe Rogan just clubbed Sanjay Gupta over the head about CNN and their lying about ivermectin. Pretty brutal. Had Gupta denouncing his own network about it.

> a nobel prize winning medicine

For treating parasites.

Give a heart transplant to a kid with a cold and you'll get yelled at, too, despite it being a wonderful procedure to have in our medical quiver.

And Viagra is for treating high blood pressure.

No, Viagra is clinically tested and FDA approved specifically for erectile dysfunction.

And it also happens to lower blood pressure which is the condition it was originally developed to treat. So if you have high but not "give this dud an Rx" high blood pressure, want Viagra and your doctor is a bro...

Sure. They were able to demonstrate to the FDA's satisfaction that it had a beneficial use outside the original intent of developing the drug. That's not unusual, but there's also a procedure you go through.

The FDA specifically warns against using ivermectin to treat COVID. So does its manufacturer (https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use...). Comparing the two scenarios is silly.

Merck is expecting to rake in billions on sales of molnupiravir. Ivermectin is off patent.

It's the intentional misrepresentation of facts which I am referring to. I have no problems with journalists writing science backed articles about using ivermectin for treating covid19. I have problems with journalists intentionally calling it horse dewormer as if that is only what it is.

So your analogy really doesn't make sense here.

I'm noting that calling it "Nobel Prize winning medicine" is just as technically accurate and potentially misleading as calling it "horse dewormer". You're doing the same thing you're complaining about.

From the intro on Wikipedia: Ivermectin was discovered in 1975 and came into medical use in 1981;[12][13] William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discovery and applications.

When you are referring to this in regards to covid19, calling it horse dewormer is intentionally mispresenting an argument in an attempt to discount it.

> When you are referring to this in regards to covid19, calling it horse dewormer is intentionally mispresenting an argument in an attempt to discount it.

"Nobel Prize winning medication" is similarly a misrepresentation in the context of COVID.

It's both a Nobel Prize winning medicine, and horse dewormer. It's also a human antiparisitic. None of these individually describe it completely, but there's one thing it's not currently - a proven COVID treatment.

That's a lazy dismissal. This paper describes twenty ways in which ivermectin can mitigate corona virus infection: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8203399/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28864889

The quote (referring to a presentation on surface disinfectant studies):

> I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you're totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light—and I think you said that that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that too. It sounds interesting…

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds—it sounds interesting to me.

That's charitable. He was mocked (unjustly, as all presidents are), but criticized (justly) for taking simple observations (UV kills the virus, disinfectant kills the virus) and extrapolating medically in a way that the president should not do in a public statement, and that's even regardless of the sloppiness of his descriptions.

Trump was not just mocked unjustly... words were inserted into his statement by major, reputable news sources, such as the New York Times, which was one of the first to begin using the word 'bleach' (which is actually dangerous to inject) instead of the stated word 'disinfectant' (which is non-specific enough to be less dangerous).

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-bleac...

IMO, this is incredibly irresponsible. Antibiotics are a disinfectant, which are completely safe to inject. Other anti-virals are also safe to inject. The Times took the word 'disinfectant', which while perhaps used incorrectly, does not immediately suggest doing any actual dangerous action, and, instead of restricting their criticism to the fact that no known COVID injectable disinfectant exists, they linked the word to actually dangerous 'cures'. While doing so, they popularized an otherwise fringe movement, and made baseless claims connecting this movement to Trump's motivations behind saying the word (the fact that such a group lobbied Trump is not in any way evidence that this is why he used that word... lots of groups lobby presidents all the time).

Joe Biden and Obama are and were surely mocked as well, but not by the likes of the New York Times, WaPo, and other major news outlets. I mean... is the New York Times running articles on Brandon? I don't think so.

They'd just been discussing bleach and isopropyl alcohol specifically. There's a pic of the slide, which states "COMMONLY AVAILABLE DISINFECTANTS (Bleach & Isopropyl Alcohol) work to kill the virus:: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/AA47/production/...

Antibiotics are not disinfectants. Both kill bacteria, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

Isopropyl alcohol is a disinfectant with many other other medical uses. e.g. wound care, skin disinfection.

Bleach (Sodium hypochlorite) is also medically used to kill pathogens during root canal procedures.

Yes. There's a reason we don't nebulize them to deal with respiratory viruses, though.

https://xkcd.com/1217/

Not a Trump fan, but having previously heard of deep tissue UV treatments, I thought they were completely reasonable questions.

It is interesting that so many people are divided on the president asking medical questions in the public setting.

When the president qualifies for the 25th amendment, it's reasonable to question whether his ideas and policies will negligently kill people.

Question, sure. But not Ignore common sense, assume irresponsible behavior, and assume public harm.

If he were unfit for office, he would have been removed. He wasn’t. I’m no Trump fan nor voter, but it’s pointless to keep posting opinions like this pretending they are facts.

It’s the continued little lies like this that helped add up to 74M votes (12M more than 2016). So if you really want to see him in office again, keep it up.

I’ve never understood this either. There is much to not like about the guy and much to mock him for, but Trumps comments here have plenty of science behind them.

It’s stuff like this that earns the media a reputation for being elitist and cruel.

People make fun of him, and I'm not going to go into whether it was responsible to phrase it the way he did or not, but in my mind the most likely explanation as to why he said it was that some scientists explained it to him and he just regurgitated what he heard without putting it into context (I don't imagine Trump is particularly technically inclined).

At the time of that statement, Cedars-Sinai researchers were actively evaluating use of UV lights in the lungs for treating COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai-statement...

Preliminary research results look promising but it will probably take several more years for such devices to be available for routine patient care.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.05.21252997v...

The root of the criticism is that a sitting president wields a lot or authority and is not supposed to tout experimental treatments. The actual media spectacle we've got though...

>The root of the criticism is that a sitting president wields a lot or authority and is not supposed to tout experimental treatments.

I hope the irony of this is not lost on readers.

"Boosters for all Americans" -Sitting President "Boosters only for people at high risk and/or over 65" -FDA a couple days later

This is interesting, and not in a good way. I'm not sure FDA as we know it can survive a two-track regime, where some medicine is fast tracked and/or cleared of legal liability. Sooner or later most new medicine will end up on the fast track, it's in the logic of large bureaucratic bodies.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/top-fda-regulators-b...

Vaccines have had special liability protection since 1986. That's nothing new.

https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/about/index.html

When I worked at a news company as a software engineer, at some point in time I was given editorial permissions. On that day I was told not to write anything negative about Dems. Ad revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com