OPINION:
The quality of mercy is always strained, but snake oil comes raw and unfiltered, harvested from ever more lethal snakes. You might think the accounts of the suffering of those stricken with the Ebola virus would soften the hearts of snake-oil salesmen. But the more horrific the suffering, the more inspired the sales pitches.
The con men are flooding the Internet and some homeopathic health stores with tonics and elixirs that boast of miraculous powers to prevent or cure sickness from the Ebola virus. The grim fact is that there is neither a preventative nor a cure.
Josephine P. Briggs, a director of alternative medicine at the National Institutes of Health, says many frightened people are falling for the scams. “In light of the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, there are some claims being made about ’alternative’ treatments for Ebola that I find very concerning,” she says.
One purported cure is called Ebola-C. This $35 bottle of pills offers 554 percent of the recommended daily dose of vitamin C to boost the patient’s immune system to withstand the virus. There’s no evidence that it does.
A California homeopathic doctor bought space in African newspapers advertising a “digitized eRemedy” for the virus. This consists of two 10-second audio clips of white noise to stimulate the body “to enhance its own functioning on every level immune system, circulatory system, energy, organ function, psyche.” Tuning a radio slightly off-station will produce the identical static, and with identical results.
A website called Natural News offers a deadly home “remedy” made up of blood from a person infected with Ebola, a little whisky and tap water. Infected blood is precisely one of the body fluids that spreads the disease, and it was removed from the Web.
Science-Based Medicine, a website designed to expose medical quackery, discovered that something called the Natural Solutions Foundation was trying to sell a mineral water with “silver nano particles,” whatever they are, at $300 for a dozen 16-ounce bottles. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission ordered the firm to cease and desist.
Both private and government organizations have all worked to take phony Ebola prevention and treatment products off the market, but scam artists are clever and stay one step ahead of the authorities. Study after study prove that many natural remedies, including echinacea, zinc, Oscillococcinum, cinnamon, elderberry, garlic and probiotics lack scientifically proven health benefits, but the public includes willing buyers.
Taking a bit of vitamin C doesn’t hurt when fending off the sniffles, but if it keeps desperately ill patients from seeking legitimate treatment, it puts everyone at risk.
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