| | | Once again you're flat out lying. Ivermectin was introduced to animals in 1981, the same year testing began with humans.
It was designed originally for veterinary use only on animals.
Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction ...
In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in its only award for treatments of infectious diseases since six decades prior, honoured the discovery of ivermectin (IVM), a multifaceted drug deployed against some of the world's most devastating tropical diseases.
Discovery of Ivermectin - American Chemical Society
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Satoshi Omura (*1935), a microbiolo-gist and bioorganic chemist at Tokyo's Kitasato Institute, hunted for new sources of pharmaceuticals. He knew that some existing drugs, includ-ing antibiotics, had been derived from compounds found in nature.
These gratifying results led Merck
to commercialize ivermectin as a
veterinary treatment beginning in
1981. Starting in 1987, the drug was
also marketed to the public under the
brand name Heartgard® (now sold
by the animal-health company Me-
rial) to prevent heartworms in dogs.
These products quickly became the
top-selling veterinary medicines in
the world, with sales topping $1 billion
annually.
At Campbell’s urging, his colleagues studied
ivermectin as a potential treatment for river
blindness. Ivermectin is a particularly attrac-
tive treatment because it has no antibacterial
or antiviral activity, and has few serious side
effects. Researchers discovered that’s because
these drugs act primarily on cellular channels
of the target organism that are not accessible
in people, pets or livestock. In young worms,
the drug alters the function of these channels
in nerve and muscle cells, leading to paralysis.
In addition, the drug makes these imma-
ture worms more vulnerable to the human
immune response, and stops adult female
worms from releasing larvae. This combined
effect helps end the parasite infestation.
In its drug development efforts, Merck
worked with the World Health Organization
(WHO) to design and implement human
clinical trials with ivermectin for river blind-
ness in Senegal in 1981, under the direction of
physician Mohammed Aziz (1929–1987). The
results with single doses of the pill proved the
effectiveness of the drug against river blind-
ness, and ivermectin was approved for human
use in 1987 under the name Mectizan®. |
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