@arstechnica I don't love the taste, but fuck it. An edge is an edge. Dang ol' belt and suspenders, man.

@arstechnica the problem with these preliminary results is not that the study itself is in any way questionable, but that the drug company is doing hundreds of these studies for all of their drugs hoping to find one that helps -- if they find one with results 1% chance to be random and they've done 100 trials... Nothing wrong with this but that's the context to understand why preliminary results shouldn't be reported like this.

@arstechnica
Interesting.
Adding that to immunisation and a mask and ventilation and room air filtering seems unlikely to do any harm.

@arstechnica

Of course, it could be that the protection lay in the reason people were using the antihistamine. It could be that nasal congestion blocks the virus.

So there’s that.

@arstechnica then I'm not lucky, as I've been using this nasal spray daily for over two weeks now (compounded with steroids) and currently in bed with COVID...

@arstechnica i feel like articles like this should come with a giant blinking sign saying "LITERALLY NOTHING IS AS EFFECTIVE AS MASKING IN ALL PUBLIC INDOOR AND OUTDOOR SPACES"

@arstechnica
They used Azelastine if anyone was curious.

@arstechnica When the initial reports on this came out a year ago, I tried azelastine nasal spray. I am allergy prone and it's cheap so why not. I had some annoying effects such as nosebleeds, so I switched to oral loratadine. According to the initial paper, loratadine has the same benefit as azelastine - there's a whole family of similar antihistamines. No way to know if it has helped protect me from COVID but it probably did prevent my usual springtime hay fever.

@arstechnica
- the intendwd treatment was azelastine nasal spray three times per day.
- "In the intention-to-treat (ITT) population, the incidence of PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection was significantly lower in the azelastine group (n = 5 [2.2%]) compared with the placebo group (n = 15 [6.7%]) (OR, 0.31; 95% CI, 0.11-0.87)."
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2838335

#science #covid #healthcare #medicine #research

@arstechnica trust prescription meds being otc there