Much ado about isoniazid and dog owners’ irresponsibility

An anti-bacterial compound used in the treatment of tuberculosis but not so well known to people suddenly created a buzz on China’s search engines and social networks. By Friday night, domestic search engine baidu.com showed 5.79 million search results for the compound, while micro blog, China’s equivalent to Twitter, recorded 50 pages of discussions on it.

But relax, the intensive search on isoniazid has nothing to do with public health. The buzz was created by a WeChat story saying isoniazid is harmful to dogs and calling on people to scatter isoniazid pills in their communities so that unleashed dogs would eat them and die.

Obviously, the writer of the story does not care a bit about dogs, which many believe are a man’s best friend. And despite being a self-proclaimed popular science writer, he doesn’t know that even if a normal person (that is, a person not suffering from tuberculosis) takes isoniazid by mistake, he/she could develop serious health problems.

For long, many medical professionals have considered isoniazid as harmful to the liver, and the drug was on the World Health Organization’s carcinogen list in 2017.

The WeChat story has been deleted. But by that time it had already been read hundreds of thousands of times and carried by hundreds of websites. In fact, some readers thanked the author of the story, who calls himself “Mr Zhang”, for his advice.

To change the situation, it is important to drive sense into careless dog owners, which in turn requires strict regulations.