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Comment by mprev | Hacker News Reader

One symptom of Coronavirus is a high fever and what we in the UK call paracetamol can reduce the fever thereby reducing the risk of organ damage.

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Reducing fever, especially with NSAIDs has shown to lead to a higher mortality rate, it suppresses your immune response. Moderate to high fever is good and is natural response to infection Organ damage needs a very high temperature 106+. If you are below this, taking fever reducers is not a good thing to help you recover from an infection. Fever reducers resulted in a 5 percent mortality increase in flu. France has warned of a link between higher mortality in young adults taking anti-febriles and Coronavirus.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › pmc The effect on mortality of antipyretics in the treatment of influenza infection: systematic ...

Paracetamol (acetaminophen/Tylenol) is not an NSAID, is not an anti-inflammatory and there's no evidence that it has any negative effect on outcomes. You're mixing it up with ibuprofen (Advil), which is an NSAID and may result in worse outcomes.

The current medical advice is take paracetamol, but not ibuprofen. https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/paracetamol-for-adults/

It helps to understand what you're talking about before writing in such an authoratitive tone.

The study linked systematically reviewed animal models of influenza and and antipyretic use and found that aspirin, paracetamol and diclofenac increased mortality.

They lamented that there weren’t any good trials in humans available to review, so the impacts of antipyretics on influenza is still an open question, but the animal models aren’t looking promising.

In other words: should you take antipyretics for the flu? Dunno for sure, but I’ll avoid it based on the data that we do have.

I'll go with what my doctor tells me but thanks for the links.

This is acetaminophen, btw. Usually called tynadol in the US.

Tylenol

I had to look up if Tynadol was the name of another drug. Sounds like it could be, heh.

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