Olivier Véran, the health minister of France, has issued a stern warning about painkillers taken by people who are feeling ill with the coronavirus: Stay away from drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin.
According to The NY Times, some health officials are advising the public to use acetaminophen instead. Verán explained in a tweet that so-called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen worsened symptoms of the illness caused by the coronavirus, he said.
The health ministry said in a bulletin to doctors that some patients had reported experiencing seriously adverse effects while taking NSAIDs. They stressed that NSAIDs should never be used with these patients.
This advice left many other medical experts, perplexed. The coronavirus is a new pathogen, and little is known about the disease it causes, called Covid-19, or how patients respond to common medications in an effort to treat it, the publication reports.
Dr. Véran’s stern warning followed a letter published in The Lancet earlier this month, in which the author proposed that certain drugs increase the number of so-called ACE2 receptors on the surfaces of cells.
According to the Lancet letter, the coronavirus uses these receptors to infect cells, as the authors also noted. And so in theory, patients taking drugs like ibuprofen might be more vulnerable to the virus.
On the other hand, Dr. Michele Barry, director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University, claims there was no research to back up the contention. “No data,” Barry said, reaffirming that there is no reason to think that infected patients should avoid temporary use of ibuprofen.
Dr. Garret FitzGerald, chair of the department of pharmacology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told The NY Times, “It’s all anecdote, and fake news off the anecdotes,” he said. “That’s the world we are living in.”
“Until there is evidence, there is no reason at all to be issuing public health guidance” about NSAIDs and the coronavirus, Dr. Fitzgerald added.
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