Demand surges for deworming medication

For the past week, Dr. Gregory Yu, an emergency physician in San Antonio, has received the same daily requests from his patients, some vaccinated for COVID-19 and others unvaccinated: They ask him for ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms that has repeatedly failed in clinical trials to help people infected with the coronavirus. Yu has refused the ivermectin requests, he said, but he knows some of his colleagues have not.

Prescriptions for ivermectin have seen a sharp rise in recent weeks, jumping to more than 88,000 per week in mid-August from a pre-pandemic baseline average of 3,600 per week, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Though sometimes given to humans in small doses for head lice, scabies and other parasites, ivermectin is more commonly used in animals. Physicians are raising alarms about a growing number of people getting the drug from livestock supply centers, where it can come in highly concentrated paste or liquid forms.

Calls to poison control centers about ivermectin exposures have risen dramatically, jumping fivefold over their baseline in July, according to CDC researchers, who cited data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Mississippi’s health department said earlier this month that 70% of recent calls to the state poison control center had come from people who ingested ivermectin from livestock supply stores.