With COVID-19 taking a tighter grip every day, researchers are trying hard to crack the COVID-19 code and come up with a cure super fast.?
However, this ain¡¯t a race, but more like a marathon, as one small misstep can prove dangerous, and that¡¯s what researchers in Brazil just experienced -- raising some serious questions around Trump's quest for procuring hydroxychloroquine from India.
Researchers in Brazil conducting a study (published in journal Medrxiv) for potential COVID-19 treatment with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine?(a less toxic derivative of chloroquine)?had to bring their research to an abrupt halt after patients developed fatal complications with a higher dosage.?
The study was being conducted in Manus, involving 81 patients where half were given a high dosage of 600 milligrams of chloroquine, two times a day for ten days; while the remaining half received 450-milligram doses for five days.
Researchers noticed irregularities in heartbeats in patients consuming higher doses in three days of the consumption. As the treatment reached the sixth day, 11 patients already died due to heart conditions.?
What¡¯s unclear if the people died from COVID-19 or from the heavy dosage. Researchers have suspended the study, with the surviving patients put on lower chloroquine doses. However, they have also revealed that the sample size wasn¡¯t large enough to denote the effectiveness of lower dose.?
They state in the report, ¡°Preliminary findings suggest that the higher [chloroquine] dosage (10-day regimen) should not be recommended for COVID-19 treatment because of its potential safety hazards. Such results forced us to prematurely halt patient recruitment to this arm.¡±
In case you didn¡¯t know, chloroquine (and hydroxychloroquine) is the same anti-malarial drug that has been touted by US President Donald Trump as the silver bullet against COVID-19 (while reports have also revealed Trump¡¯s financial connections with Sanofi). FDA has cleared the medicine with an ¡®Emergency use Authorisation¡¯.?The medicine has been recommended by researchers in China for treating COVID-19 patients (their study showing promising results).?
Hydroxychloroquine?is also the medicine that Trump forced India to export (as India is one of the leading producers of the medicine) to treat COVID-19 cases in the US.
However, the study doubts its efficacy, stating, ¡°Global recommendations for COVID-19 are being made based on unpowered studies, however, and due to the chaotic urgency, such drugs are being prescribed in a compassionate manner given the severity of this disease. Our study raises enough red flags to stop the use of such dosage worldwide in order to avoid more unnecessary deaths.¡±
So according to this fatal study, looks like chloroquine (or hydroxychloroquine) may not necessarily cut it when it comes to exclusive use against COVID-19 patients.?