Chennai: Manager at herbal products firm tests corona 'drug' on himself, dies

An employee of a Tamil Nadu herbal products firm has died in Chennai after consuming a medicine he and his boss developed to treat coronavirus infections.
K Sivanesan, 47, a pharmacist and production manager at the company, and Rajkumar, 67, tested the drug on themselves.
Both fainted. They were rushed to a nearby hospital.
Sivanesan, who is from the capital's Perungudi neighbourhood, consumed a larger quantity of the drug and died at a hospital in the state capital.
Rajkumar only took a few drops; he is now stable and is undergoing treatment.
A police investigation is ongoing.

There are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, although there is now interest in Gilead Sciences Inc's remdesivir, which has received emergency use authorisation in the U.S.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/herbal-products-firm-manager-dies-coronavirus-medicine-1676128-2020-05-09

lalasticla kindly move to front page. People need some caution swallowing everything in the name of preventing coronavirus. Thank you

Eyaa

Thank God say dem use themselves as lab rats.

Very honest scientists.

Mad scientists

Indeed.
It makes absolutely no sense experimenting with oneself. There is a good reason why a standard process has been established in the testing of new drug products. You generally start with cell-free in vitro systems, then you graduate to cell-based in vitro systems which allows you to qualify the effect of the product on individual cells. If it is something that will be dangerous you will already begin to have an indication of that at this stage. Then you progress to testing in different animal species, especially mice and rats where you among other things determine the dose of the investigational product that will kill half the animal population (LD50). If the LD50 is too small, it shows that the drug product is very toxic and you simply don't proceed to the next level. If the LD50 is something that is manageable you basically perform autopsy on the dead animals to find out the organs that are damaged so as to know the category of people that shouldn't use the product if it eventually passes approval. For instance, if the recorded deaths in the animal species is mainly caused by damage to the kidney or liver, then human patients who will later use the drug that have renal and/or hepatic problems will be advised not to use the drug. Or to use it under constant monitoring by medical doctors. Contraindications we call this.
It is after you have established safety in animal species, including how it affects foetus in pregnant animals, that you progress to human testing, which is a very meticulous and highly standardized process conducted in four stages. It is unfortunate to read that a fellow pharmacist who should have known better than others was careless enough to use himself as a guinea pig. I believe that's possibly because he believed that being a herbal product the drug must be relatively safe. This is a misconception that the public should be aware of. Herbal products either kill you immediately or they kill you in installments. Acutely toxic herbal preparation, like the one that killed the Indian pharmacist here, will disturb your body functions immediately. For some people this may range from diarrhoea, to general discomfort and in the extreme to death. I cannot begin to count how many patients I have personally come across who took herbal preparations being hawked around in an effort to "detoxify" or "wash their blood". Unfortunately, a large majority of herbal products that you will consume will do nothing to you immediately, but will start damaging important organs in your body including kidney, liver, intestine, brain, skin, etc...without your knowledge. Then 5, 10 years or more than the line, the person comes up with serious sickness involving failure of these organs. Then death. The lack of record keeping in Nigeria makes it difficult for people to directly link these health consequences to their habitual intake of herbal products. And instead, as usual, witches and demons and evil enemies are blamed for such morbid and fatal eventualities.

This is however not to discredit the role and importance of herbal medications in our health system. On the other hand, it seeks to encourage the users of these products as well as the experts to always exercise the same level of caution (in fact higher level is needed) as accorded standardized medications.

KevMitnick:
Mad scientists

Chai! Good scientists.They decided to use themselves as lab rats