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Life-saving coronavirus drug 'major breakthrough':
A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus.
The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say.
The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.
[...] The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions, and it appears that it helps stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.
[...] In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, around 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and were compared with more than 4,000 who did not receive the drug.
For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%. For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.
Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."
[...] Dexamethasone has been used since the early 1960s to treat a wide range of conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.
[...] The drug is given intravenously in intensive care, and in tablet form for less seriously ill patients. So far, the only other drug proven to benefit Covid patients is remdesivir, an antiviral treatment which has been used for Ebola.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 17 2020, @06:54PM (4 children)
That's certainly not how the term is commonly used. As commonly used "Fake News" means "makes me look bad or otherwise exposes my lies"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @07:41PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news [wikipedia.org]
https://www.prattlibrary.org/research/tools/index.aspx?cat=90&id=4735 [prattlibrary.org]
https://www.statista.com/topics/3251/fake-news/ [statista.com]
And as I said in a different post [soylentnews.org]:
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday June 18 2020, @07:06PM (1 child)
Thing is, I don't recall the term "fake news" ever being used against actual false news broadcasts (except by coincidence). In fact I don't recall ever hearing the term used before Trump started throwing it around - we had other terms for it: "spin", "propaganda", "lies", etc. If it's fake, it's not news.
Look at the history of the Wikipedia page you linked - it was first created in Jan 2017
Even the disambiguation page only has one other reference, to "The Fake News Show", a British comedy that began in February 2017 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_(disambiguation) )
There have been other similar terms coined around the world, but it seems they are almost always used to deny inconvenient coverage, rather than to actually call out falsified information.
As such, my inclination would be to accept the term as having the primary definition of being a denial of unflattering coverage, rather than anything to do with the actual legitimacy of the news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2020, @07:37PM
There. FTFY.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/10/02/trump-claims-he-invented-the-term-fake-news-an-interview-with-the-guy-who-actually-helped-popularize-it/ [washingtonian.com]
I'm sure there's more documentation out there, but I'm not responsible for disabusing you of your ignorance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2020, @06:16PM
The kind of stuff Secondary Infektion [zdnet.com] is doing is fake news.
And that sort of stuff is the commonly understood definition of "Fake News," not the targets of blathering from a certain spray-tanned asshole.