[HN Gopher] Nasal spray treats Delta variant infection in mice
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       Nasal spray treats Delta variant infection in mice
        
       Author : geox
       Score  : 88 points
       Date   : 2022-03-28 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (science.ubc.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (science.ubc.ca)
        
       | hotcrossbunny wrote:
       | Can I say this really is great news for mice
        
       | viralresearch wrote:
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | I'm wondering under what conditions this will be used if it makes
       | it to humans...
       | 
       | If it needs to be used within 12 hours of exposure, and 1 in 16
       | people is currently infected [1], then any day you visit a place
       | with more than ~16 people, you have more than likely been
       | exposed, and ought to be taking this medication. Even if you just
       | meet _one_ other person each day, then after 16 days
       | statistically you 'll probably have been exposed.
       | 
       | So I guess this nasal spray should be taken every day you leave
       | the house?
       | 
       | [1]:
       | https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | maxerickson wrote:
         | If it was effective and widely used the percent infected could
         | be a lot lower.
        
         | geraneum wrote:
         | There are privacy preserving tracking applications (i.e.
         | Corona-Warn in Germany, etc.) that can tell you if you had a
         | longer significant exposure. Maybe that's helpful. The caveat
         | is that not everyone uses the app but I think it might still be
         | helpful.
        
           | blumomo wrote:
           | Curious to know, how does the app measure/decide if the
           | exposure was "significant"? And what is "exposure" in that
           | context? Curious to learn!
        
             | _Microft wrote:
             | Have fun: https://github.com/corona-warn-app
        
       | TrispusAttucks wrote:
       | Seems similar to the Diluted Povidone Iodine Nasal Spray [1]
       | promoted by Dr. McCullough for awhile now. Unfortunately Povidone
       | is available OTC for cheap so not very profitable.
       | 
       | [1] https://covid19.onedaymd.com/2021/09/could-simple-saline-
       | nas...
        
         | amluto wrote:
         | In what way? The spray in question contains a TMPRSS2
         | inhibitor. It seems similar to povidone iodine the way that
         | penicillin is similar to bleach.
        
           | TrispusAttucks wrote:
           | It's a nasal spray for preventing and treating covid.
        
         | PostOnce wrote:
         | For any readers who might be caught off guard, Peter McCullough
         | has been on a notorious press circuit talking every quack
         | medicine theory under the sun; I'm not sure if he's after
         | infamy, money, or both, but what he is not after is public
         | health.
         | 
         | He's affiliated with
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...
         | which is a political--not medical--organization.
         | 
         | He was sued by Baylor for claiming an affiliation he didn't
         | have.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough#COVID-19_m...
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...
         | 
         | I've been sent links to his videos by colleagues (who, aside
         | from the covid-19 conspiracies, seem like smart people), so I
         | looked into everything that was wrong with this guy 6 months
         | ago.
         | 
         | Anyway, he's full of shit, don't take it from me, just go
         | digging before you appeal to his authority.
        
           | TrispusAttucks wrote:
           | Yikes.
           | 
           | I see him get shit on a lot but what exactly did he say or do
           | that was so wrong? Some of his original "fringe" ideas are
           | now supported by science. Like having the audacity to say
           | nature immunity is a thing.
        
       | pezo1919 wrote:
       | www.c19early.com has iota-carrageenan on top of the list and is
       | used nasally too.
        
         | nonomaybeyes wrote:
         | I've used the diluted povidon-iodine solution (Betadine) with
         | great success for myself. Not as a spray but as a gargle and
         | nasal rinse with a neti pot. This was during the delta wave and
         | I had a sore throat and 39.5C fever. The rinsing pricked in a
         | good way for a few minutes and then subsided, at which point
         | all viruses seem to be quite dead. Next morning I was
         | completely better.
         | 
         | I do this for the the flu as well. It starts in the nose and
         | throat and if treated early it won't make it's way down into
         | the lungs.
        
         | mikeyouse wrote:
         | It also has ivermectin, melatonin and fennel flower near the
         | top... I'd get my medical advice elsewhere.
        
       | trhway wrote:
       | from my understanding the virus continue to exist in the cells of
       | the nasal surfaces well after (like weeks) the immune system has
       | already beaten it up inside the body. That virus naturally
       | continues to attack the body from those surfaces and thus
       | continuously triggers the immune system resulting in that low-
       | symptom prolonged period in the people with normally working
       | immune system.
        
       | BiggsHoson wrote:
       | "So how was work today?" "Well, I got to grab mice and force
       | inhaler sprays into their tiny little nostrils against their
       | wills." "Sounds better than my day."
        
       | jaynetics wrote:
       | "All ten of the treated mice survived infection, compared with
       | only 20 per cent of the untreated mice. [...] The compound has
       | the potential to be used as a broad-spectrum treatment against
       | other viruses which use the same mechanism [...] including
       | influenza viruses such as influenza A, H1N1, and influenza C."
       | 
       | But apparently it is most effective very soon after exposure.
       | From the paper [1]:
       | 
       | "in the K18-hACE2 mouse model, treating with N-0385 resulted in
       | complete protection against SARS-CoV-2 induced mortality and
       | significantly protected against weight loss, lung pathology, and
       | viral infection when treatment occurred at the time of, or 12
       | hours after, infection with the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2"
       | 
       | [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04661-w
        
       | Tagbert wrote:
       | Glad to see "in mice" spelled out in the title. Too often it is
       | an unstated condition in early tests like this.
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | Often it's because it wouldn't make the front page otherwise.
         | In general, society has democratically agreed to upvote
         | clickbait and downvote accuracy, but glad to see that isn't the
         | case here.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | I don't disagree, but I'd more specifically say "society has
           | democratically agreed to upvote news they want to hear and
           | downvote news they don't, with little to no
           | concern/consideration for how accurate or true it is."
           | 
           | HN community is among the better at this IMHO, but it still
           | happens here quite a bit true. The good news is, over the
           | course of a few hours to a day or so it usually
           | balances/corrects itself and ends up in a good state, but
           | sometimes not before true but hard truth comments are killed
           | and resurrected by vouches.
           | 
           | As I think about it, maybe the correlation is more with
           | reaction time? The rapid downvotes tend to early and often,
           | so it could be that people who vote on feelings are also the
           | ones to react very quickly? Interesting to think about
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | jchw wrote:
           | A more charitable explanation: the title length limit of 80
           | characters makes it difficult to keep all of the important
           | information in the HN title.
           | 
           | No doubt that news publications absolutely do sometimes
           | intentionally bury the lede and leave important information
           | out of the _original_ title, but I don't think HN users are
           | all optimizing just to hit the frontpage.
        
             | dheera wrote:
             | Could we just post gzipped titles and distribute a plugin
             | to overcome the limitation? This is _hacker_ news after
             | all.
        
               | cbhl wrote:
               | Pretty sure the entire page is already served with
               | Content-Encoding: gzip.
               | 
               | An 80 character limit is great for scanning by humans,
               | though.
        
               | dheera wrote:
               | Yeah but this is less about actual transfer efficiency
               | and more about novel ways to overcome the limits of what
               | is allowed to be submitted.
        
               | version_five wrote:
               | What kind of overhead does gzip have? I'd be interested
               | to know how many characters you could fit into 80
               | compressed characters. Some mapping of (2 byte?) unicode
               | characters to 3ish lowercase letters could be effective.
               | Is there any standard way like that?
        
               | dheera wrote:
               | This is an interesting question. I haven't researched the
               | overheads.
               | 
               | Separately, I feel like if you account for grammatical
               | rules, it is possible to eliminate certain "filler" words
               | in a lossy fashion but add them back later based on
               | grammatical rules. For example, you don't need to say "in
               | mice", you could just say "mice", the meaning is obvious,
               | and "in" could be fixed in post-processing at the client
               | end.
               | 
               | You could also quite possibly eliminate all vowels and
               | still reconstruct everything accurately.
        
               | version_five wrote:
               | > For example, you don't need to say "in mice", you could
               | just say "mice", the meaning is obvious, and "in" could
               | be fixed in post-processing at the client end.
               | 
               | > You could also quite possibly eliminate all vowels and
               | still reconstruct everything accurately.
               | 
               | My guess is that 10 minutes after that is rolled out,
               | someone will have found a collision that decompresses to
               | some kind of dirty joke
        
               | jazzyjackson wrote:
               | There's base2048 [0], which can cram 11 bits into each
               | code point, or 110 bytes into 80 characters.
               | 
               | [0] https://github.com/qntm/base2048
        
       | doubtfuluser wrote:
       | A new one for https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-28 23:02 UTC)