View from the North 40: Move along, folks, there's no plot to twist here

If you aren’t cynical before you get into the news business, you will be soon after. And just when I think I’m too cynical to ever be surprised by the news again, along comes a news article that just lights up my brain like a bottle rocket.

I know you were expecting to see the headline and a little news summary here after that opening paragraph. Normally you would, like the ol’ one-two punch, but I have to pull that second punch and tell you that the headline and the whole story have been retracted across many news outlets, by recommendation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. I know, I know, I’m sacrificing a lot of this column’s impact to do the right thing.

Stupid ethics.

Still, this is what captured my imagination: “Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, studies find.”

I may have gasped before I said, out loud, “What?!” Not that I wanted it to be true. It was just struck by “what the plot twist did I just read?”

I’ve been watching the ivermectin fly off the horse supply shelves like, well, toilet paper, but who saw this news coming?

I don’t care where you fall on the whole controversy of using an anti-parasitic drug to combat a virus, that headline — in a year and a half of one surprising plot twist after another — is the mother of all plot twists.

Sure, the study turned out to be debunked, but for a few hours it was a moral, ethical and philosophical dilemma of epic proportions. I wanted to make popcorn and sit back to snack while I watched this all play out.

According to the article, researchers in three Nigerian universities studied the effects on people of using human-safe ivermectin to rid them of Onchocerca volvulus parasitic worms that cause blindness and skin diseases. Serious stuff.

The article went on to claim that researchers found a selection of men receiving ivermectin treatment who had almost no swimmers in their man-pond, so to speak. Also, those few swimmers had poor swimming skills and suffered from issues like two heads, two tails, no tails and albinism. Serious stuff.

And serious stuff gives weight to serious questions.

Are the naysayers and the Social Darwinists going to be right? If you are taking a dewormer to combat a virus, is it nature’s way that you be taken out of the gene pool? What if the naysayers are religious? Is God invoking divine intervention on the gene pool?

Are the pro-ivermectin people right, but forced to make an untenable moral decision? Do you save your life, but sacrifice a possible future family? What’s the moral answer?

And, excuse me, but what about the gender disparity? Did anyone bother to check into how this off-the-books treatment might be cooking the eggs, or messing with the burners in the oven? No? No word? The women just have to making decisions on gut instinct and Kentucky windage. Again?

As it turns out, in less than 24 hours news organizations had replaced the article with this statement: “Concerns over the scientific research methods, the veracity of the original, peer-reviewed report and public statements by the FDA saying that infertility is not a known side effect of Ivermectin all led to our editorial decision to remove the story.”

I guess, though, because I believe in those stupid ethics, I should say that a study published by the National Institutes of Health “revealed that administration of ivermectin once weekly for 8 weeks induced slight fertility disturbances. While, pre-treatment with (the hypertension drug) verapamil disturbed male fertility through altering different sperm parameters and (microscopic anatomy) structure of reproductive organs.”

In other words, the fertility thing is still be on the table to some degree.

Who knows, maybe one day in the future a dad spending quality time with his child, talking about the family legacy, will say, “You might not exist today if I hadn’t, by chance, read some weird column that mentioned possible problems from using ivermectin on humans. How’s that for luck and Kentucky windage?”

And then I’ll get my big plot twist after all.

——

In the meantime, keep practicing safe reading skills and leave enough horse dewormer in the stores for the horses at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .