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Last week, an emergency room doctor in San Antonio, Dr. Gregory Yu received the same daily requests from his patients, some vaccinated for Covid-19 and others unvaccinated: They ask him for ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasites. Worms that have repeatedly failed in clinical trials to help people infected with the coronavirus.

Dr. Yu said she denied requests for ivermectin, but she knows some of her colleagues didn’t. Prescriptions for ivermectin have seen a sharp increase in recent weeks and 88,000 per week According to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the pre-pandemic average in mid-August is down from an average of 3,600 per week.

Some pharmacists even report shortages of the drug. Travis Walthall, a pharmacist in Kuna, Idaho, a town of about 20,000 people, said this summer alone, he filled more than 20 ivermectin prescriptions, up from two or three in a typical year. During the past week, he has not received the drug from his suppliers; they were all outside.

Mr Walthall said he was surprised at how many people are willing to take an unapproved drug for Covid. “God, that’s terrible,” he said.

Small doses are sometimes given to humans for head lice, scabies, and other parasites, while ivermectin is more commonly used in animals. Doctors are sounding the alarm about the increasing number of people purchasing the drug from animal supply centers, where it is available in highly concentrated paste or liquid forms.

Calls to poison control centers regarding ivermectin exposures increased dramatically, jumping five times from baselines in July, according to CDC researchers citing data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Mississippi’s health department said earlier this month that 70 percent of recent calls to the state poison control center came from people who bought ivermectin from livestock supply stores.

D., toxicologist and medical director at the South Texas Poison Center. Shawn Varney said his center received 191 calls about exposure to ivermectin in 2019; Having received 260 calls so far this year, the center is on track to reach 390 by the end of the year. The vast majority of recent calls have come from people taking veterinary products to treat or prevent Covid-19.

Dr. “Everyone wants some treatment for Covid because it’s such a devastating disease,” Varney said. “I’m begging people to stop using ivermectin and get vaccinated because that’s the best protection we have at this point. Everything else is risk upon risk.”

Dr. People who call the poison control center after taking ivermectin sometimes report nausea, muscle pain and diarrhea, Varney said. He noted that there have been ivermectin overdose deaths in the past, although he doesn’t know anything specifically related to Covid-19.

He added that the greatest risk comes from people taking the livestock product and consuming a much higher dose than is appropriate for humans – sometimes 10 to 15 times the amount a human-approved capsule can contain.

Dr. “People go to animal feed stores and buy a highly concentrated formulation because it’s for 1000-pound animals,” Varney said. “They open themselves up to great potential harm.”

Ivermectin was introduced as a veterinary drug in the late 1970s, and its discovery of its effectiveness in combating certain parasitic diseases in humans won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

While it has not been shown to be effective in treating Covid, people are now clamoring to take the drug, trading tips on Facebook groups and on Reddit. Some doctors compared the phenomenon to the surge of interest in hydroxychloroquine in the past year, although there are more clinical studies evaluating ivermectin.

The Food and Drug Administration weighed in last week. Agency, “You are not a horse” tweeted out, Together warning He explained that ivermectin is not FDA-approved to treat or prevent Covid-19, and that taking it in high doses can cause serious harm.

Soon review It concluded that none of the 14 ivermectin studies with more than 1,600 participants provided evidence of the drug’s ability to prevent Covid, improve patient conditions, or reduce mortality. 31 more studies are underway to test the drug.

“There is a great interest in repurposing well-known inexpensive drugs such as ivermectin that are readily available as oral tablets,” the authors of the review, Maria-Inti Metzendorf and Stephanie Weibel, told The Times in an email. “Even if these conditions seem ideal, the results of current clinical trials conducted so far cannot confirm the widely advertised benefits.”

One of the largest trials examining ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19, Trying Together6 was discontinued by the data security monitoring board because the drug was shown to be no better than a placebo at preventing hospitalizations or prolonged stays in the emergency room. A professor at McMaster University who led the study, which included more than 1,300 patients, Dr. Edward Mills said he would have stopped working earlier if it weren’t for the team’s level of interest in ivermectin.

Dr. “This is futile now and you’re not providing any benefit to patients participating in the trial,” Mills said.

Another study of the drug found that ivermectin can be quite benign unless taken in high doses. A researcher at the Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases in Colombia, Dr. Eduardo Lopez-Medina, led a randomized control trial For the study on the effects of ivermectin last spring and no statistically significant effect On reducing the duration of Covid symptoms. However, it also found that there was no statistically significant increase in adverse events for patients taking ivermectin, despite taking a fairly high dose of 300 micrograms per kilogram.

Dr. “It seems like a safe drug, but that’s not enough to clearly prescribe it,” López-Medina said. “People should use it in trials, but not to treat patients. The data is not robust enough to support its use.”

Researchers and doctors are particularly concerned by people seeking ivermectin as a possible form of prevention or treatment rather than receiving one of the highly effective Covid vaccines. FDA fully approved The Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for people aged 16 and over last week and the Moderna vaccine are expected to be approved in the coming weeks.

A physician in New York and founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Dr. “The only functional strategy we have to contain Covid-19 is vaccination,” said Irwin Redlener. “If people don’t get vaccinated because of the bullshit they read online, it affects our ability to contain this epidemic.”