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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?

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Careful to avoid the symptoms of hysteria.

When a building is burning, often, people's first reaction is to ignore the alarm and carry on with what they were doing. The first people to leave look like worry-warts. Those who make it out, though, are the ones who think for themselves and realize there is a problem, before the herd stampedes. Insurance is cheap before there's a problem, but impossible to get after. What is my "cost" and "risk" from having chloroquine? I'll probably never take it, so almost nothing. What is my upside? Maybe nothing, maybe everything.

I hear a lot of "it is just the flu." Maybe. The Spanish Flu was horrific, though. And when was the last time a city the size of london was quarantined for the flu?

I believe in data-driven fear. Care to go over the data?

Yeah though chloroquine is fairly mild stuff - they used to give it to all travellers going to malarial places but have mostly stopped because malaria mostly became resistant. I'm not a medic but reading the letter to nature I'd put the odds of it protecting you in real life at say 50/50 so if you're getting exposed it could be a reasonable risk reward. Even if it didn't stop infection it could make the illness less severe.

I avoid touching my face, stay away from crowds (not that I didn't before, hah!), cough / sneeze into tissue / handkerchiefs, wash my hands properly and have a bottle of sanitizer at all times.

I might need more measures if I was in the middle of Wuhan (or even just feeling ill, I guess) but frankly where I am it feels like any additional steps would be done out of fear, not reason.

Drink tonic water. Quinine’s close enough.

I now have a good explanation for the boss why I'm drinking gin & tonics at work..

James Burke covered this in Connections² : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yLa_IrAj-o

Connections was- and probably still is- my favorite show I've ever seen. I watched it when I was very young and it really shaped my view on the world and helped me learn to love history and the stories in it.

Also made me realize that originality and ownership of ideas is way more complicated than i'd thought.

You would have to drink about two liters of tonic water a day to consume a day’s dose of quinine in pill form. Which is doable, but exposes you to quinine side effects.

Antimalarial compounds quinine, chloroquine and mefloquine affect the electrophysiological properties of Cys-loop receptors and have structural similarities to 5-HT3 receptor antagonists. So they might act at 5-HT3 receptors.

In 2006, the FDA banned sale of unapproved drugs containing quinine because of the risk of serious side effects or death.

I could probably send you one as the start of my experiment.

Count me in! I am first initial (which you can see in my username) followed by "beland" on google's email service.

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