Stop behaving like spoilt kid; even US won't mess with us: China to India

As the deadly coronavirus has spread worldwide, it has carried with it xenophobia -- and Asian communities around the world are finding themselves subject to suspicion and fear.

When a patient on Australia's Gold Coast refused to shake the hand of her surgeon Rhea Liang, citing the virus that has killed hundreds, the medic's first response was shock.

But after tweeting about the incident and receiving a flood of responses, the respected doctor learned her experience was all too common.

There has been a spike in reports of anti-Chinese rhetoric directed at people of Asian origin, regardless of whether they have ever visited the centre of the epidemic or been in contact with the virus.

Chinese tourists have reportedly been spat at in the Italian city of Venice, a family in Turin was accused of carrying the disease, and mothers in Milan have used social media to call for children to be kept away from Chinese classmates.

In Canada, a white man was filmed telling a Chinese-Canadian woman "you dropped your coronavirus" in the parking lot of a local mall.

In Malaysia, a petition to "bar Chinese people from entering our beloved country" received almost 500,000 signatures in one week.

The incidents are part of what the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine has described as "misinformation" which it says is fuelling "racial profiling" where "deeply distressing assumptions are being made about 'Chinese' or 'Asian-looking' people." Disease has long been accompanied by suspicions of foreigners -- from Irish immigrants being targeted in the Typhoid Mary panic of 1900s America to Nepali peacekeepers being accused of bringing cholera to earthquake-struck Haiti in the last decade.

"It's a common phenomenon," said Rob Grenfell, director of health and biosecurity for Australia's science and research agency CSIRO.

"With outbreaks and epidemics along human history, we've always tried to vilify certain subsets of the population," he said, comparing the behaviour to 1300s plague-ridden medieval Europe, where foreigners and religious groups were often blamed.

"Sure it emerged in China," he said of the coronavirus, "but that's no reason to actually vilify Chinese people." In a commentary for the British Medical Journal, doctor Abraar Karan warned this behaviour could discourage people with symptoms from coming forward.

Claire Hooker, a health lecturer at the University of Sydney, said the responses from governments may have compounded prejudice.

The World Health Organisation has warned against "measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade", but this has not stopped scores of countries from introducing travel bans.

The tiny Pacific nation of Micronesia has banned its citizens from visiting mainland China altogether.

"Travel bans respond largely to people's fears," said Hooker, and while sometimes warranted, they often "have the effect of cementing an association between Chinese people and scary viruses".

Abbey Shi, a Shanghai-born student in Sydney, said the attitude shown by some of her peers has "become almost an attack on students who are Chinese".

While Australia's conservative government has banished its citizens returning from Wuhan -- the central Chinese city at the epicentre of the virus -- to a remote island for quarantine, thousands of students still stuck in China risk their studies being torpedoed.

"Right now it looks like they have to miss the semester's start and potentially the whole year, because of the way the courses are set up," Shi said.

According to Hooker, studies in Toronto on the impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS -- another global coronavirus outbreak in 2002 -- showed the impact of xenophobic sentiment often lasted much longer than the public health scare.

"While there may be a cessation of direct forms of racism as news about the disease dies down, it takes quite a bit of time for economic recovery and people continue to feel unsafe," she said.

People may not rush back to Chinese businesses or restaurants, and may even heed some of the more outlandish viral social media disinformation -- such as one popular post imploring people to avoid eating noodles for their own safety.

"In one sense you might think the effects lasted from the last coronavirus to this one because the representation as China being a place where diseases come from has been persistent," Hooker said.

Munich, Feb 16: Iran's foreign minister said Saturday that US President Donald Trump is receiving bad advice if he believes an American "maximum pressure" campaign against his country will cause the government in Tehran to collapse.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a group of top defense officials and diplomats at the Munich Security Conference that the information provided to the president has dissuaded Trump from accepting offers from other leaders to mediate between Washington and Tehran.

"President Trump has been convinced that we are about to collapse so he doesn't want to talk to a collapsing regime," Zarif said.

To support his argument, the Iranian minister cited Trump's decision to pull out unilaterally in 2018 from Iran's nuclear deal with the US and other world powers. Trump said the landmark 2015 accord didn't address Iran's ballistic missile program or regional activities and needed to be renegotiated.

Since then, the Trump administration's re-imposition of US sanctions in a campaign of so-called "maximum pressure" have taken a severe toll on the Iranian economy and sent Iran's currency plunging.

"I believe President Trump, unfortunately, does not have good advisers," Zarif said. "He's been wanting for Iran to collapse since he withdrew from the nuclear deal." Zarif also said the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3 was a miscalculation by Washington that has galvanized support for Iran instead of increasing pressure on the regime.

The Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, promised Iran economic incentives in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. It was intended to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb, which Iran insists it does not want to do.

Since the US withdrawal, the deal's other signatories - Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China - have unsuccessfully struggled to come up with ways to offset the effects of the new American sanctions.

Washington has pressured the other countries - so far without success - to abandon the deal entirely US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the Munich Security Conference earlier Saturday that while there may be disagreements on what to do with the JCPOA, "when I talk to my counterparts here in Europe, everybody gets it."

"Everyone understands that these are folks who continue to build out their nuclear program," Pompeo said. "So there's a common understanding about the threat; we have tactical differences on how to proceed."

In recent months, Iran has steadily violated the limitations the deal placed on the amount of enriched uranium and heavy water it can stockpile, the number and type of centrifuges it can operate, and the purity of the uranium it enriches.

Iranian officials insist the moves are intended only to put pressure on the countries that remain part of the deal to provide economic help to Iran and that all the measures taken are fully reversible.

Zarif rejected Trump's suggestion of negotiating a new deal, saying the one negotiated during the Obama administration was the only vehicle for talks on Iran's nuclear program.

"There is no point in talking over something you already talked about. You don't buy a horse twice," he said.

"It's not about opening talks with the United States. It's about bringing the United States to the negotiating table that's already there," Zarif said.

Jun 4: A malaria drug President Donald Trump took to try to prevent COVID-19 proved ineffective for that in the first large, high-quality study to test it in people in close contact with someone with the disease.

Results published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine show that hydroxychloroquine was no better than placebo pills at preventing illness from the coronavirus.

The drug did not seem to cause serious harm, though -- about 40% on it had side effects, mostly mild stomach problems.

 “We were disappointed. We would have liked for this to work,” said the study leader, Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota.

“But our objective was to answer the question and to conduct a high-quality study,” because the evidence on the drug so far has been inconclusive, he said.

Hydroxychloroquine and a similar drug, chloroquine, have been the subject of much debate since Trump started promoting them in March.

Hydroxychloroquine has long been used for malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis, but no large studies have shown it or chloroquine to be safe or effective for much sicker patients with coronavirus, and some studies have suggested the drugs may do harm.

Trump took a two-week course of hydroxychloroquine, along with zinc and Vitamin D, after two staffers tested positive for COVID-19, and had no ill effects, according to results of his latest physical released by his doctor Wednesday.

Federal regulators have warned against hydroxychloroquine's use except in hospitals and formal studies because of the risk of side effects, especially heart rhythm problems.

Boulware's study involved 821 people in the United States and Canada living with someone diagnosed with COVID-19 or at high risk of getting it because of their job -- doctors, nurses, ambulance workers who had significant exposure to a sick patient while not wearing full protective gear.

They were randomly assigned to get either the nutrient folate as a placebo or hydroxychloroquine for five days, starting within four days of their exposure. Neither they nor others involved in the research knew who was getting which pills.

After 14 days in the study, 12 per cent on the drug developed COVID-19 symptoms versus 14 per cent in the placebo group, but the difference is so small it could have occurred by chance, Boulware said.

“There's basically no effect. It does not prevent infection,” he said of the drug. Even if it were to give some slim advantage, “we'd want a much larger effect” to justify its use and risk of side effects for preventing illness, he said.

Results were no different among a subgroup of participants who were taking zinc or vitamin C, which some people believe might help make hydroxychloroquine more effective or fight the coronavirus.

There are some big caveats: The study enrolled people through the Internet and social media, relying on them to report their own symptoms rather than having them tracked in a formal way by doctors.

Participants were not all tested for the coronavirus but were diagnosed as COVID-19 cases based on symptoms in many cases. And not all took their medicines as directed.

The results “are more provocative than definitive,” and the drug may yet have prevention benefits if tried sooner or in a different way, Dr. Myron Cohen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote in a commentary in the journal.

Others were glad to see a study that had a comparison group and good scientific methods after so many weaker reports on hydroxychloroquine.

“This fits with everything else we've seen so far which suggests that it's not beneficial," said Dr. Peter Bach, director of a health policy center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

This study was in younger relatively healthy people, but the results “would make me very discouraged about trying to use this in older people” who are most vulnerable to serious illness from the coronavirus, Bach said.

“If it does work, it doesn't work very well.” Dr. Dan Culver, a lung specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, said there's still a chance that giving the drug sooner than four days after someone's exposure to the virus may help prevent illness.

But the study “takes 'home run' off the table” as far as hopes for the drug, he said.

The study was mostly funded by David Baszucki, founder of Roblox, a California-based game software company, and other private donors and the Minnesota university.

Boulware also is leading a study testing hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19. The study is finished and results are being analyzed now.

On Tuesday, the journal Lancet posted an “expression of concern” about a study it published earlier this month of nearly 15,000 COVID-19 patients on the malaria drugs that tied their use to a higher risk of dying in the hospital or developing a heartbeat problem.

Scientists have raised serious questions about the database used for that study, and its authors have launched an independent audit.

That work had a big impact: the World Health Organization suspended use of hydroxychloroquine in a study it is leading, and French officials stopped the drug's use in hospitals. On Wednesday, the WHO said experts who reviewed safety information decided that its study could resume.