This headline caught my eye this morning: “Why you should avoid some cough syrups if you think you’ve got the coronavirus.”
If you’ve ever had trouble with a cough, you’re probably familiar with Robitussin, Delsym, Theraflu, Triaminic, Benylyn, DayQuil, and NyQuil. If you’ve developed a cough after being infected with coronavirus, it’s natural that you would use one of these.
New research suggests, however, that this may not be a good idea.
These cough suppressants contain dextromethorphan, which stifles signals in the brain that set off the reflex to cough. In tests conducted at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, researchers introduced dextromethorphan into the cells of African green monkeys growing in petri dishes. The subsequent addition of SARS-Co-V-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, resulted in more prolific viral growth.
These findings do not prove that cough medicines containing dextromethorphan will worsen the condition of people infected with coronavirus, or that they will make bad outcomes more likely. But the researchers were concerned enough to advise cough sufferers who might be infected with the virus to avoid these medications and called for more research on the issue.
Halfway down the article, however, we find this sentence: “But the group’s discoveries raised hopes as well.”
After mapping the coronavirus’s genome, they identified 322 distinct steps needed to ensure the coronavirus can enter a cell, hijack its machinery, and make copies of itself. Then they looked for compounds that would intervene in this process.
The group identified sixty-nine existing drugs, experimental drugs, or compounds on the way to becoming drugs. Some of the compounds the team identified are “many times more potent” than remdesivir, a drug now being used as a COVID-19 treatment.
This is fantastic news. If existing drugs could be used alone or in combination with others to…
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