[HN Gopher] Effects of tea, catechins and catechin derivatives o...
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       Effects of tea, catechins and catechin derivatives on Omicron
       subvariants
        
       Author : anigbrowl
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2023-10-04 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | giantg2 wrote:
       | Interesting. I wonder if there's any practical application
       | observed in the wild. Like people who drink tea are less likely
       | to catch it or something.
        
         | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
         | The abstract appears to be suggesting that this tea
         | inactivation might make it less likely for Covid positive
         | people to _give it_ to others. Covid is mainly spread through
         | saliva (droplets when coughing /speaking), but unless you're
         | putting tea up your nose it would seem to not have that much
         | protective effect from catching it.
         | 
         | > Healthy volunteers consumed a candy containing green tea or
         | black tea, and saliva collected from them immediately after the
         | candy consumption significantly decreased BA.1 virus
         | infectivity in vitro.
        
           | amluto wrote:
           | Or perhaps if you are actively drinking tea and possibly
           | rinsing your nose with it, it will protect you from infection
           | to a decent degree?
           | 
           | The study is showing a good deal of virus inactivation from
           | _the levels of tea that might be present in saliva 0 minutes
           | after drinking tea_. But not such an extreme degree of
           | inactivation that it seems at all likely that residual levels
           | of the active ingredients an hour later would be likely to
           | help much.
        
       | iterateAutomate wrote:
       | > This work was funded by Japan Science and Technology Agency,
       | JPMJTM20Y6, ITO EN, Ltd.
       | 
       | Found in the "Funding" section of the research paper.
       | 
       | > Ito En is the largest green tea distributor in Japan
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ito_En
       | 
       | Not saying this is enough to invalidate the work of these
       | scientists, just food for thought.
        
       | daft_pink wrote:
       | we have a vaccine. why are we testing tea against a deadly
       | disease?
        
       | Zolde wrote:
       | It feels like a little too late. Science has to wait on controls,
       | and that is difficult to do with a new disease.
       | 
       | Civilian science/shitposters were promoting tea and catechins
       | since early 2020, but such information was classified as
       | dangerous misinformation by the authorities fighting an
       | "infodemic".
       | 
       | https://justpaste.it/8bq9r
       | 
       | > If smelling not good is a bit of a problem, then raw apples,
       | lemons, spinach, lettuce, green tea and chew gum would help a bit
       | 
       | > Significant inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 by a green tea catechin,
       | a catechin-derivative and galloylated theaflavins in vitro
       | 
       | > Preferably only tea and not tea extract pills, as the latter
       | have a chance to cause liver injury
       | 
       | > results strongly suggest that EGCG, and more remarkably TSA and
       | galloylated theaflavins, inactivate the novel coronavirus
       | 
       | > Teas contain Epigallocatechin-gallate (EGCG) which is a zinc
       | ionophore that helps your cells to absorb zinc that halts viral
       | replication in your cells.
       | 
       | > Antiviral activity of [green tea] and plant juices ([black
       | chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) juice], [pomegranate (Punica
       | granatum) juice]) against SARS-CoV-2 and influenza virus in vitro
       | 
       | > Green tea, muscadine grapes, cacao powder, and dark chocolate -
       | able to bind to a particular enzyme, or protease, in the virus
       | and stop it reproducing
       | 
       | > To further substantiate the inhibitory activities, extracts
       | prepared from [green tea (GT), two muscadine grapes (MG), cacao,
       | and dark chocolate (DC)], which are rich in CAG, ECG, GAG, EGCG,
       | or/and PB2, were used for inhibitory assay.
        
         | amluto wrote:
         | It's not too little too late. It's just too little.
         | 
         | The paper is showing about a 100x reduction in infectivity from
         | exposure to saliva collected "0 minutes" after drinking tea.
         | That's a very small effect. Compare to, say, penicillin, which
         | will kill viruses in the levels present in your blood and
         | tissue _hours_ after taking a small pill.
         | 
         | Or, for a different comparison, I don't know of anyone testing
         | a handgun against COVID (sorry, xkcd), but pool water and
         | presumably chlorinated tap water reduces infectivity by at
         | least 1000x in 30 seconds:
         | 
         | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8480993/
         | 
         | Maybe one could use these compounds in tea as a basis to try to
         | develop a useful antiviral drug. But numbers like this don't
         | make it look like the pandemic could have been averted by
         | telling everyone to drink four cups of tea a day or to
         | continuously gargle chlorinated tap water.
         | 
         | (Seriously, I doubt there were evil authorities out there
         | trying to get people not to drink lots of tea so they could
         | drum or support for mask mandates or quantitative easing or
         | whatever other measures seem horrible. This whole concept seems
         | utterly absurd. And at least opening a window or using a MERV
         | 13 or N95 or better seem like more justifiable public health
         | measures than distributing free bottles of iced tea!)
        
           | experimenting wrote:
           | Not necessarily evil, but elitist.
           | 
           | Authorities were writing that even multivitimins could be
           | dangerous and had no scientific proof against Covid. Mentions
           | of turmeric got your Youtube video delisted. It is crazy that
           | the information gathered above has to reside on a paste site,
           | when 25 years ago anyone would have found it on BBS or
           | mailing list. Western medicine is needlessly dismissive of
           | natural medicine. They censored wisdom of the crowds.
           | 
           | First masks were made taboo, as they did not work for
           | civilians (but in reality they had not enough in stock to
           | service health care workers). The flip flop on masks only
           | came later. In February it was known that chloroquine, which
           | helped for SARS-1, was also likely effective for SARS-2.
           | Interesting to see the hitjob on that. Ivermectine in vitro
           | studies were only censored, because these were discussed on
           | "far-right" sites, not because it did not work (because it
           | turned out to help in vivo, but doctors lost license for
           | prescribing it anyway).
           | 
           | Let the people, especially black skinned people, take vitamin
           | D next time there is a viral pandemic. No need for public
           | health info-management. It did more damage than good.
        
       | underdeserver wrote:
       | @dang - typo in the title.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Fixed. Thanks!
        
       | underdeserver wrote:
       | Ummm. What? Tea inactivates Covid? I had lots of tea when I was
       | sick. Didn't do much.
        
         | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
         | That's not what the abstract appears to say. It is arguing that
         | tea (specifically green tea or black tea candies) reduced the
         | _infectivity_ of people who already had Covid. It didn 't argue
         | that tea improved symptoms of people who were already infected.
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-04 23:03 UTC)