Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: More on the repurposed…, in reply to Shaun Lott,
That doesn’t seem credible to me. Looking at the preprint, we could do equivalent in vitro work here in NZ, so I’m be very surprised that there was no capacity to do the same in the whole of the US science system.
Yes, that is puzzling. More specifically, Victor Zonana, an American who works with Hazel at Global Health NewZealand, presented the Brazilian results to the NIH in the hope of replicating them in the US and was told there wasn’t a high-containment lab available.
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Hard News: The cannabis referendum: the evidence, in reply to Alfie,
Nailed it. What’s not to like about a drug that sends arthritis to the background AND makes you feel a bit pleasant.
The fact of people potentially enjoying their medicine – and there not necessarily being a clear line between those two things – is surprisingly challenging.
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The Herald's Derek Cheng has more information on the panel and a good summary of its findings.
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It gets worse: Paula Bennett and the Scientology leaflets.
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Hard News: The Scientology front…, in reply to Simon Armstrong,
The pro’s and con’s of the cannabis referendum needs to be informed by science and evidence
I disagree. The referendum is about justice. Nobody is suggesting recreational drug use is in anyway scientifically good for peace of mind, sense of well being, quality parenting, better driving, improved coordination, short sentences, logical discourse, appetite control, proof reading….
I know a few perfectly okay people who’d beg to differ on some of those. But the thing is, it’s about justice and science. There’s plenty of evidence to show the public health benefits of taking the criminalisation out of cannabis.
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It seems worth noting that the Church of Scientology has also been exploiting the Covid crisis by distributing bogus leaflets in Auckland. They contain a QR code that links to a Scientologist "course".
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Hard News: Towards the referendum: this…, in reply to Joe Boden,
I'm presenting to at least five groups of elderly people (U3A, Probus etc.) over the next couple of months. I'm told I am pretty persuasive...
That's a good audience to talk to. They've signed up for knowledge.
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Hard News: Cannabis research: there's a…, in reply to Mark Cubey,
Russell, is there any way you can block ritawgoodman12 from spamming your site? I first saw the unwanted message just above on Radiation (it’s still there).
Apart from shutting down new registrations, no. It's a different one every day.
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Kia ora!
I have an update. There has been quite a bit happening around this, and the first publication, a pre-print, has landed a preclinical study from Brazil:
To rapidly respond to an unfolded pandemics, it is pivotal to catalogue preclinical data on the susceptibility of SARS-CoV-2 to clinically approved drugs, as an attempt to trigger clinical trials with promising products (4). We used this approach during ZIKV, YFV, and CHIKV outbreak in Brazil, when we showed the susceptibility of these viruses to SFV (15– 18, 32). SFV and dacaltasvir are considered safe anti-HCV therapy with potential to be used with broader antiviral activity. Here, we demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 is susceptible to daclatasvir, across different cell types tested, and to SFV, in a cell-dependent manner. In line with their activity against HCV, these drugs impaired SARS-CoV-2 RNA synthesis.
There are also clinical trials in progress, and it seems that the original data from Iran is to be published in a peer-reviewed journal article. So more news is forthcoming.