The U.S President told the Coronavirus Task Force about the hydroxychloroquine anti-viral drug (Plaquenil) on March 29, 2020. Apparently some 1,100 infected patients are trying it out in a test in New York. Therefore we jumped onto Medicine Net right away. There we learned Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) and its sister drug chloroquine (Aralen) are indeed under investigation. This post summarizes what we know about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine because you need to know.
What We Know About Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine
Plaquenil and Aralen to use their common names are closely-related anti-malarial drugs. However, they also help treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Lupus is a long-term autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system becomes hyperactive and attacks normal, healthy tissue.
But we must under no circumstances self-administer these drugs. That’s because information about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine is limited. Moreover according to Medicine Net, their ‘mechanism of action’ is unknown. So we only know what they do, not how they do it.
Work Done on Treating Covid-19 Patients in Korea
The Korea Biomedical Review published a treatment guide for coronavirus on February 13, 2020. In it, they recommend anti-viral treatment only in covid cases where patients are old, or have serious symptoms.
The Korean COVID-19 Central Clinical Task Force comprises physicians and experts treating confirmed Covid-19 patients. It recommends administering lopinvar or chloroquine to patients at high risk only.
We discovered something interesting about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine at U.S. National Library of Medicine. That’s because they say the latter is the milder of the two, and may therefore be useful during the cytokine storm. This systemic inflammatory response occurs late-phase in critically ill SARS-CoV-2 infected patients.
According to Wikipedia a number of Covid-19 deaths are also attributable to cytokine release storms. That is all we know for now. We should not let our imagination and hopes run ahead of us in these uncertain times.
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Preview Image: Release of Cytokines
