Reportedly, the wife mistook chloroquine phosphate, used to treat parasites in fish, for the anti-malarial chloroquine, ‘the stuff they’re talking about on TV’.
I’m really trying hard not to make this political. But, the irresponsible spreading of inconclusive information just killed a person.
Only one?
Killed a person 1: dumb enought to listen to Trump and 2: dumb enough to take a substance without being sure what it is or does.
Some googling shows that chloroquine phosphate is the antimalarial drug. So they must have taken a massive overdose, or else one of the other ingredients was toxic.
People do stupid things when they panic, and it’s more likely that they will panic when they observe that at a time of crisis their country is led by someone who seems to have missed his true calling as the back end of a pantomime horse. So, yeah, this may be lethal stupidity on the part of the man concerned, but nevertheless the consequences are partly down to political leadership. Politicians need to take account of the fact that some of the people are lethally stupid, and govern in a way which minimises the harm resulting from that.
Thanks for the correction; I had understood the original article to imply that they’re distinct.
And while I agree it’s dumb to just take drugs without prescription, people in panic often aren’t at their smartest, so feeding them questionable information is itself rather horrendous.
My sister, when young, took enough cloroquine to be sick, mistaking it for some kind of something for her period pain. Something she found in the medicine cabinet.
My mother was kind of blase about pain and sickness until my brother spent a couple of months in hospital for a late appendicitis diagnosis. She wouldn’t have approved of the use of pills for period pain: her opinion was that if it didn’t require morphine, it didn’t require pain killers.
What the couple ingested and the drug the president was talking about are distinct. The pharmaceutical form, the one the president was talking about, is Hydroxychloroquine. What these people ingested was not the pharmaceutical form. If they had only taken one capsule of Hydroxychloroquine, they’d probably be fine. In the U.S., you can’t get Hydroxychloroquine without a prescription.
If someone ingests chemicals intended to treat fish after listening to Trump, it’s difficult for me to shed a tear.
I don’t understand this article stating that Hydroxychloroquine is in short supply because it must be prescribed by a health care profession.
The only way it would be in high demand and pharmacies running out of supply is if patients are going to their providers and the providers are haphazardly prescribing the drug. If, like the following letter suggests, providers are prescribing Hydroxychloroquine at the whim of the patient, that is a little frightening.
They are not different * forms*; they are distinct chemicals, both available in formulations approved for humans. That this was a different formulation was likely not the problem.
Re: prescriptions, it’s a prophylactic antimalarial. It’s not like you need to be sick to get it.
Trump was talking about Hydroxychloroquine, fit for human consumption and if they had taken a tablet or two of that, they would not have died. What the couple took was not fit for human consumption, clearly, regardless of form or formulation. When Darren Garrison wrote “Some googling shows that chloroquine phosphate is the antimalarial drug. So they must have taken a massive overdose, or else one of the other ingredients was toxic.,” he’s implying they took the drug available at pharmacies. That is not the case.
But prescribing it en masse for Covid19 prophylaxis or treatment is leaving shortages for people who need it because they are sick. Fine if Hydroxychloroquine is effective at preventing or treating Covid19, but that has not yet been demonstrated. It is in trial phase.
This does happen. I have it from my cousins who are doctors-- one of whom is a GP. What also happens is that patients go to a doctor as a new patient and say they have been on X med for a long time, and need a refill. Can they get one? A lot of doctors will write the scrip before they get the patient’s records if it is not something that is abused, or has any potential for getting people high, or being used to make something else that has street value.
Hydroxychloroquine probably now has a street value, so it is probably not being prescribed ANYMORE except for established patients who are already taking it regularly for chronic conditions.
But the initial prescriptions requested by patients did not necessarily raise flags for doctors.
Some of those patients may well have been people with conditions like Lupus, which is something it is prescribed for. They may not have been having many symptoms, but were worried that Lupus put them in a vulnerable class, so they wanted the medication on hand. They mentioned to their doctor that So-&-so in their support group was doing really well, and being helped a lot on the med. Could I try it?
Doctor prescribes one month of a low dose. But patient is only going to save it, then take it for a week, if he or she catches Covid-19, so multiply the low dose by 4.
Again Trumps fault…
+1
:smack:
You can’t compare the dosage of a medical tablet and a fish tank tablet. This guy probably got a massive overdose.
It’s really a cheap shot against the President. Hydroxychloroquine is being used in many countries to treat Coronavirus. It’s effectiveness hasn’t been clinically proven yet. But it’s reasonably safe when administered by a physician.
Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine phosphate are two different drugs. I have heard BOTH drugs discussed as components of various proposed Coronavirus treatments.
You are obviously not a child of the Sixties so I’ll help you. Mom says the pain needs to be worse, but if it’s bad enough you get morphine. Do you shrug off the pain, or do you point at the red face with a big frown and tears, and start crying? Remember that you are a future wastrel and want drugs. And you hurt.
The price of the aquarium medicine has increased.
It is stupid to use drugs made for aquarium use. Quality control for a fish is no where like quality control for humans.
The guy took some random amount of drugs designed for fish and died?
“You can’t fix stupid.”
I wonder why the fish version doesn’t kill fish? They’re much smaller than humans, if we’re talking about the typical goldfish. It makes me think they took too much of a veterinary formulation, but that’s just a totally uneducated guess.
They were dumb to do that, but perhaps they were also very desperate. Did they have or think they had COVID 19?
It wouldn’t have happened at all if trump had kept his trap shut.