The fake rabies vaccine incident that happened in China recently exposes a basic fact of China that China is the country with the second largest incidence of rabies in the world following India. The chance of infection with relevant infectious diseases is low in developed countries due to their attention to disease prevention of domestic dogs and cats, and the small number of stray dogs and cats there reduces the risk of disease spread, while, due to limited economic levels and poor disease control, most developing countries have a large number of stray dogs and domestic dogs that are not under control, and the incidence of rabies there is high due to reasons like low vaccination rate, low consciousness of rabies prevention, and lack of animal shelters.
Interestingly, someone suggested on the internet to efficiently kill stray dogs by extensively spreading animal food packaged by isoniazid to each community and park, so as to force the Chinese to form the safety awareness for keeping dogs, which was highly regarded. And there has been the incident in Beijing that someone deliberately dispersed bait containing isoniazid in a large area in a community to eliminate unleashed pet dogs.
Isoniazid (CAS: 54-85-3)
In the online article, there are two reasons for highly recommending isoniazid: one, isoniazid is a good drug that is not toxic to humans, instead, it is very conductive to humans because it can treat diseases difficult to treat such as tuberculosis and is generally considered safe; two, isoniazid is highly toxic to dogs: administered according to 0.15g/kg, it will kill a dog in 90min, which requires an extremely low cost, while the artificial method to kill dogs such as chasing after and beating dogs with clubs is cruel and not acceptable to the society, which has low efficiency but high cost; three, using isoniazid can avoid the compliance with legal requirements and is considered in the article to not belong to spreading poison: spreading highly toxic substances such as tetramine to public places might kill children or tramps, etc. due to eating by mistake and harm public health, being an explicit crime of spreading poison, but spreading pharmaceutical products is not included in such crime.
According to provision of the Criminal Law of China, whoever commits the crime of spreading poison that has not caused harmful consequences shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than ten years; according to provision of Article 115 hereof, whoever commits the spread of poison to public places that causes serious injuries, death or heavy losses to public and private property shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than ten years, life imprisonment, or death penalty, and if the damage is extremely serious, he shall be sentenced to death penalty or life sentence.
However, I have a question to the new research in the abovementioned article: what are the reasons for the high toxicity of isoniazid to dogs? The explanations on the internet are as follows: dogs have different genes from humans, and such drug cannot be metabolized in dogs, thus it kills them. Therefore, the large-area dispersing of isoniazid is not spread of poison, which is totally nonsense!
For example, 4 references in the 7 at the end of the article are about the pharmacokinetic study of isoniazid conducted on dogs, which means that isoniazid cannot directly kill dogs. Isoniazid could still be metabolized in dogs, and the dogs used for the experiment were still alive after completion of the metabolism. Most surprising, not only can isoniazid be used to treat the tuberculosis of humans, it can also be used to treat that of dogs and cats. Then, what killed the stray dogs? Apparently, it was the dose of isoniazid: the overdose of isoniazid would easily kill patients due to poisoning. The article mentions many times that the dose of 150...
![[Co(L-5-HTP)2Br2] Coordination compounds of cobalt(ll) with L-5-hydroxytryptophan](https://eimg.pharmasources.com/image/20200618/LNjPs6Og1kMqRzCLfY42J67taxAIKCyixNVuVtOQ.png)
![[Co(L-5-HTP)2Br2] Coordination compounds of cobalt(ll) with L-5-hydroxytryptophan](https://eimg.pharmasources.com/image/product/20200619/e72fb248167f539df4a8f6116f30400djpg)
(All Rights Reserved)