Americans poisoning themselves with horseworm medicine to treat COVID-19

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In yet another stupid attempt to protect against the pandemic, Americans are now turning to a horse medicine to treat and prevent COVID-19 and are poisoning themselves in the process.

The drug, ivermeticin, is an antiparasitic paste used to deworm horses. It can also be used to eliminate lice, scabies and worms in dogs, cats and other mammals.

Humans can tolerate the medication in small amounts, experts say, but many are ingesting amounts intended for animals, which can be severely poisonous.

The news parallels a similar movement last year, when Americans started taking bleach in hopes of killing any resident COVID-19 germs.

The drug was first announced as a potential COVID-19 remedy in a press release in January, published by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).

The statement claimed that the National Health Institute allowed the drug to be prescribed as an option for the treatment of COVID-19 after analyzing the data submitted by the organization’s founding members, Dr. Paul Marik and Dr. Pierre Kory.

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“Ivermectin is one of the safest, cheapest and most widely available drugs in the world,” said Kory in a press release. “The studies we presented to NIH revealed high levels of statistical significance, showing benefits of great magnitude in rates of transmission, need for hospitalization and death. Furthermore, the totality of test data that support ivermectin is unprecedented ”.

The organization includes intensive care professionals who previously praised the controversial use of vitamin C for sepsis, according to MedPage Today.

But on February 11, the NIH stated that “there is not enough evidence to recommend for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19. The results of properly developed, well-designed and well-conducted clinical trials are needed to provide more specific and evidence-based guidance on the role of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19. “

The Food and Drug Administration has also asked Americans not to self-administer ivermectin for animals.

“I want it to work, but at the same time, it all looks like déjà vu from the first two months of the pandemic, when we weren’t determined about hydroxychloroquine,” Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease doctor at McMaster University, told MedPage today. “We don’t want to go back, a year later, saying it didn’t help and it may have hurt.”

Many people are also obtaining the drug from their vets and using horse-sized doses on themselves, Julie Weber, president of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, told ABC News.

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“We just had the case of someone using a veterinary source of ivermectin, a medicine for horses, which contains a significantly higher dose of the drug,” she said.

According to the Missouri Poison Center, severe ivermectin overdoses can result in seizures, coma, lung and heart problems. Smaller doses can include side effects such as nausea, skin rashes and increased heart rate.

The Missouri Poison Center saw an increase of 40 to 50 more calls per day than it received before the pandemic, some of which related to the use of ivermeticin.

The number of people who accidentally poisoned themselves with household cleaning products has also increased by 20% since the start of the pandemic, according to the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The peak includes those who use the products to clean their homes, as well as those who swallowed the cleaning products in an attempt to rid their bodies of COVID-19 germs.

In April last year, Donald Trump, the former president of the U.S., suggested injecting disinfectants or using ultraviolet light in the body to clean up any remaining viruses. Several medical experts considered his comments dangerous and warned against the use of cleaning products or drugs that were not approved to fight the virus.