Haven't there been several other studies showing it has largely been ineffective? There was a completely unrelated one yesterday about how it didn't seem to help prevent catching the virus.
It seems the technique could be used to stop the virus from spreading from cell to cell inside the patient, so, pretty much, it appears very close to a cure.
If this could be shown to work, that might not be such a bad idea provided the effects could be ceased quickly if the reaction becomes a problem in itself. It's been suggested that the antivirals only provide a substantial benefit in the early stages of the infection, and that the complications and deaths in the later stages are not from the presence of the virus per se, but the damage and fluid in the lungs from the immune system's attempt to fight it.
A lot has been invested in drugs. Most of them don't work. The best that was found was Dexamethasone, which reduces mortality in severe cases significantly.
Generally medication for viral infections seems to be hard. There isn't much good medication for other respiratory viral diseases. It doesn't look like a major breakthrough in drug treatment will happen.
A vaccine can make the difference between "you get the disease" and "you don't get the disease and can't spread it to others". No drug comes remotely close to that.
Is this supposed to be a cure or a treatment? It seems like to be a cure it would have to catch every instance of the virus in the body, which seems like it would be hard
I don't think it is moving the goalpost. The french doctor who first advocated this molecule pushed from the outset for testing and treating early rather than waiting for respiratory problems as we currently do [1]. In fact he later mentioned that when people had severe respiratory problems, the viral load was low and an anti-viral treatment wouldn't really help.
but it is very effective (if not needed against death then at least helpful against long covid). Read as many articles as you want from here: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/
You've got to be kidding. Effective antiviral drugs aren't at all benign; it would be completely unethical to administer them on a prophylactic basis to healthy patients who don't even have a confirmed exposure. There is no reliable evidence that showers are effective for controlling respiratory viruses. OTC cough suppressants are nearly useless, barely better than placebos.
We don't know if it does yet. We know it causes an immune response. We don't know if that stops you from catching it, and we don't know if it stops you from being infectious. It tips the scales in that direction, and all we really need is for it to be effective enough to drop R0 low enough that coupling it with reasonable restrictions makes the virus go away, which is why it's worth pursuing, but that's a different goal to ensuring you can't catch it at all.
They aren't claiming that this cures the virus. It's purely to treat the cytokine storm that causes most covid deaths. This is for people who are already hospitalised and receiving oxygen, with the most dramatic results for those on ventilators. At that point the mortality rate is high enough that the risks of side effects are worthwhile.
That definitely could be true, but from what I've read it probably isn't. One of the ways the virus kills people is by destroying their ACE2 receptors, which your lung cells need to function. If you blocked them all, your lung cells would die anyway. So as long as the virus can enter your lung cells, you might as well prevent it from killing them by making extra ACE2 receptors. That's the theory anyway.
There are also many other ways you can block the virus from entering your lungs that don't involve downregulating your ACE2 receptors.
In general, anti-viral treatments don't work very well. Antibiotics have worked great, but it's much harder to effectively target viruses with medicine (probably because they reproduce inside the cells of their hosts)
tl;dr: It's a chemical called nitric oxide. You spray it up your nose and it is supposed to render most viral particles inert. Here's a quote from that article you should probably be aware of:
> She acknowledged that the experiments took place outside the human body, in test tubes, and do not provide definitive proof of how effective the spray will prove in nasal passages
So yeah... not exactly a miracle cure, in my layman opinion. Even if it does prove efficacious in human nostrils, it won't do much for, for example, mouth-breathers.
Looks interesting but so far only talks about using it as prophylactic via inhalation; however the virus is known to enter via mouth, eyes and anus as well (breaks in skin probably). Even so inhalation and touching to mouth are likely the most common vectors of infection, so seems promising.
The problem is "if it works": There's been a few attempts in the past and from what I've seen, none of them worked well.
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