Nasal spray treats Delta variant infection in mice | Hacker News Reader

Nasal spray treats Delta variant infection in mice

science.ubc.ca

96 pointsgeox33 comments

"All ten of the treated mice survived infection, compared with only 20 per cent of the untreated mice. [...] The compound has the potential to be used as a broad-spectrum treatment against other viruses which use the same mechanism [...] including influenza viruses such as influenza A, H1N1, and influenza C."

But apparently it is most effective very soon after exposure. From the paper [1]:

"in the K18-hACE2 mouse model, treating with N-0385 resulted in complete protection against SARS-CoV-2 induced mortality and significantly protected against weight loss, lung pathology, and viral infection when treatment occurred at the time of, or 12 hours after, infection with the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2"

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04661-w

Glad to see "in mice" spelled out in the title. Too often it is an unstated condition in early tests like this.

Often it's because it wouldn't make the front page otherwise. In general, society has democratically agreed to upvote clickbait and downvote accuracy, but glad to see that isn't the case here.

I don't disagree, but I'd more specifically say "society has democratically agreed to upvote news they want to hear and downvote news they don't, with little to no concern/consideration for how accurate or true it is."

HN community is among the better at this IMHO, but it still happens here quite a bit true. The good news is, over the course of a few hours to a day or so it usually balances/corrects itself and ends up in a good state, but sometimes not before true but hard truth comments are killed and resurrected by vouches.

As I think about it, maybe the correlation is more with reaction time? The rapid downvotes tend to early and often, so it could be that people who vote on feelings are also the ones to react very quickly? Interesting to think about

A more charitable explanation: the title length limit of 80 characters makes it difficult to keep all of the important information in the HN title.

No doubt that news publications absolutely do sometimes intentionally bury the lede and leave important information out of the original title, but I don’t think HN users are all optimizing just to hit the frontpage.

Could we just post gzipped titles and distribute a plugin to overcome the limitation? This is hacker news after all.

What kind of overhead does gzip have? I'd be interested to know how many characters you could fit into 80 compressed characters. Some mapping of (2 byte?) unicode characters to 3ish lowercase letters could be effective. Is there any standard way like that?

This is an interesting question. I haven't researched the overheads.

Separately, I feel like if you account for grammatical rules, it is possible to eliminate certain "filler" words in a lossy fashion but add them back later based on grammatical rules. For example, you don't need to say "in mice", you could just say "mice", the meaning is obvious, and "in" could be fixed in post-processing at the client end.

You could also quite possibly eliminate all vowels and still reconstruct everything accurately.

> For example, you don't need to say "in mice", you could just say "mice", the meaning is obvious, and "in" could be fixed in post-processing at the client end.

> You could also quite possibly eliminate all vowels and still reconstruct everything accurately.

My guess is that 10 minutes after that is rolled out, someone will have found a collision that decompresses to some kind of dirty joke

There's base2048 [0], which can cram 11 bits into each code point, or 110 bytes into 80 characters.

[0] https://github.com/qntm/base2048

Pretty sure the entire page is already served with Content-Encoding: gzip.

An 80 character limit is great for scanning by humans, though.

Yeah but this is less about actual transfer efficiency and more about novel ways to overcome the limits of what is allowed to be submitted.

I'm wondering under what conditions this will be used if it makes it to humans...

If it needs to be used within 12 hours of exposure, and 1 in 16 people is currently infected [1], then any day you visit a place with more than ~16 people, you have more than likely been exposed, and ought to be taking this medication. Even if you just meet one other person each day, then after 16 days statistically you'll probably have been exposed.

So I guess this nasal spray should be taken every day you leave the house?

[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

There are privacy preserving tracking applications (i.e. Corona-Warn in Germany, etc.) that can tell you if you had a longer significant exposure. Maybe that’s helpful. The caveat is that not everyone uses the app but I think it might still be helpful.

Curious to know, how does the app measure/decide if the exposure was “significant”? And what is “exposure” in that context? Curious to learn!

Have fun: https://github.com/corona-warn-app

_microft linked the GitHub for Details.

tldr: generates random ids (1 per 5 min i think?) that it keeps broadcasting via Bluetooth.

It saves the ids it broadcastet (sent ids) and it recieved.

If the saved ids geht too old to be relevant ist deletes them.

If you get a positive PCR you can opt-in to notify your contacts, this works by you releasing your sent ids. The released ids are regularily published by app provider.

The app checks the published ids, if it finds published keys in its list, it checks how often they are in its list (to aproximate duration) and what signal strength was (to aproximate distance).

Based in duration and distance it warns that you had a risky contact and should get tested.

Besides that it also has a few other features now you can Scan QR-Code of vax-certificate or neg test result and then show those from App so that eventorganizers can scan them with an App that veryfies signatures

you can check in to places/events and get anon notifications if later it turns out soneone there was positive. (Think restaurants, parties, anyone can make their own event to get a QR-Code they can print out)

you can add a testprofile so that when you go get tested they scan a qr code to get the needed data, rather than having to tell them

you can write a contact diary that autodeletes after 15 days.

Dunno if anyone uses the diary.

Also, the Long delay until health-minister comissioned the check-in feature lead to a private competitor called 'Luca' that does it differently and is infamous among IT folk. If you want to read up on Luca and speak german (or have a translate you like)

https://www.luca.fail/

... within 12 hours?!

If it was effective and widely used the percent infected could be a lot lower.

Can I say this really is great news for mice

from my understanding the virus continue to exist in the cells of the nasal surfaces well after (like weeks) the immune system has already beaten it up inside the body. That virus naturally continues to attack the body from those surfaces and thus continuously triggers the immune system resulting in that low-symptom prolonged period in the people with normally working immune system.

A new one for https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

"So how was work today?" "Well, I got to grab mice and force inhaler sprays into their tiny little nostrils against their wills." "Sounds better than my day."

www.c19early.com has iota-carrageenan on top of the list and is used nasally too.

It also has ivermectin, melatonin and fennel flower near the top... I'd get my medical advice elsewhere.

I've used the diluted povidon-iodine solution (Betadine) with great success for myself. Not as a spray but as a gargle and nasal rinse with a neti pot. This was during the delta wave and I had a sore throat and 39.5C fever. The rinsing pricked in a good way for a few minutes and then subsided, at which point all viruses seem to be quite dead. Next morning I was completely better.

I do this for the the flu as well. It starts in the nose and throat and if treated early it won't make it's way down into the lungs.

Seems similar to the Diluted Povidone Iodine Nasal Spray [1] promoted by Dr. McCullough for awhile now. Unfortunately Povidone is available OTC for cheap so not very profitable.

[1] https://covid19.onedaymd.com/2021/09/could-simple-saline-nas...

In what way? The spray in question contains a TMPRSS2 inhibitor. It seems similar to povidone iodine the way that penicillin is similar to bleach.

It's a nasal spray for preventing and treating covid.

For any readers who might be caught off guard, Peter McCullough has been on a notorious press circuit talking every quack medicine theory under the sun; I'm not sure if he's after infamy, money, or both, but what he is not after is public health.

He's affiliated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic... which is a political--not medical--organization.

He was sued by Baylor for claiming an affiliation he didn't have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough#COVID-19_m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...

I've been sent links to his videos by colleagues (who, aside from the covid-19 conspiracies, seem like smart people), so I looked into everything that was wrong with this guy 6 months ago.

Anyway, he's full of shit, don't take it from me, just go digging before you appeal to his authority.

Yikes.

I see him get shit on a lot but what exactly did he say or do that was so wrong? Some of his original "fringe" ideas are now supported by science. Like having the audacity to say nature immunity is a thing.

Instead of me pointing to random other authorities (which you could find yourself), let me ask you this:

Why do you hear about McCullough often? Why among the millions of doctors is he one of the only doctors that can be found holding his position, instead of the outweighed-by-millions-of-doctors position that vaccines are a much better idea?

And why, of all subfields, a cardiologist?

Is it more likely that he's the only guy in the world who figured it out, or is it more likely that he is making shit up for money and fame?

I'll leave the answer as an exercise to the reader.

Okay.

So what did he say?

Tell me that and you win but you don't know and haven't heard.

Someone told you to refute it and you comply unknowingly.

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