[imagesource:John Locher/ AP]

Hydroxychloroquine, a drug commonly used to treat malaria, has been in the spotlight since it was first believed to be a potential treatment for COVID-19, according to initial studies in China.

Early on, however, a number of researchers said that they believed it to be ineffective, but prominent figures on social media like Elon Musk started tweeting otherwise. 

Then Donald Trump started taking it, claiming that it was the ultimate preventative measure and would somehow stop him from contracting the disease.

He appears to think that he’s immune, hardly ever wears a mask, and seems more focused on staging photo ops than dealing with America’s coronavirus pandemic.

Needless to say, the topic of hydroxychloroquine is a controversial one.

Despite months of testing, scientists are still divided over its effectiveness, or lack thereof.

Over to City Press:

A major blow for hydroxychloroquine came on Friday when British scientists stopped the hydroxychloroquine arm of the Recovery trial. The Recovery trial is a multi-arm, randomised, controlled trial that is comparing several potential treatments for Covid-19.

In the trial, a total of 1 542 patients were randomised to hydroxychloroquine and compared with 3 132 patients randomised to usual care alone. There was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of deaths or in other key indicators, such as how long patients stayed in hospital.

The researchers said that the drug did not work as a treatment for infected patients and that it should not be used to treat patients with Covid-19 in hospitals.

The findings have yet to be published in a medical journal.

It’s worth noting that despite months of trials, hydroxychloroquine has to date, not been proven effective for treating COVID-19 in humans, especially in “placebo-controlled, randomised, controlled clinical trials, considered the gold standard for medical evidence”.

Trials of the drug continue with some, including the World Health Organisation, testing hydroxychloroquine as part of its ‘Solidarity’ trial.

Solidarity is a multi-arm randomised control trial comparing a number of different experimental treatments for Covid-19. South Africa is one of over 70 countries participating in the Solidarity trial. (Spotlight previously reported on the Solidarity trial here.)

Dr Jeremy Nel, co-principal investigator of the Solidarity trial in South Africa, confirmed that it is going ahead with the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial. In South Africa, the trial is being conducted in 14 hospitals in most of South Africa’s provinces. According to Nel, recruitment of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 at these healthcare facilities will soon begin.

Nel, who is head of the Infectious Diseases Division at Helen Joseph Hospital, University of the Witwatersrand, said that chloroquine can block Sars-CoV-2 from replicating, and can stop the virus from entering or being produced by a cell.

More evidence to the contrary, however, has come out of the University of Minnesota in the US where researchers found that hydroxychloroquine did not prevent people who had been exposed to people infected with the virus from developing the virus.

City Press provides an extensive overview of all the studies currently underway, which you can read in full here.

For now, until something has been peer-reviewed and proven, it’s best to exercise caution, especially when you consider that some people who need it for proven treatments have had trouble acquiring it.

While you wait, read up about the potential vaccine coming out of Oxford University to keep your spirits up.

[source:citypress]