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A fool and his money are easily parted, but so are desperate people!
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A fool and his money are easily parted, but so are desperate people!
In Brazil a local man in Sao Paulo posted a video on Facebook showing a bag he was holding with tree bark shavings. He showed his followers that it’s labeled “quina tea” and explains how to prepare the drink he says will “immunize your body and fight COVID-19.”
The demand for the tea will be high, he says, and he urges everyone watching to buy theirs now.
Unscrupulous and merciless people are taking advantage of other peoples fears who in their desperation they are parting with their hard earned money to buy bark from a family of plants known locally as Quina, used often in the Amazon and other rural indigenous communities to combat malaria and other inflammatory conditions.
The Quina tree is thought to have inspired what would later become hydroxychloroquine, a medication being touted by both Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as a treatment for COVID-19.
The Quina trees aren’t quite what these Brazilians think and the tea being promoted in videos and messages across social media could do more harm than good. Red cinchona, a totally different tree found in the Andes produces quinine, the antimalarial compound behind chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, but as the Quina tree is not a source of any quinine.
So the unscrupulous and merciless tout this as a prevention and a cure for COVID-19, knowing that people will part with their money, not knowing or not caring that the produce they sell could be toxic and not to be ingested at all by humans.
“Plants don’t produce anything specifically for us,” says Vanderlan Bolzani, an organic chemist at São Paulo State University who specializes in the chemistry of natural products and medicinal plants. “They only produce what they need to defend themselves. And a lot of the time, what they produce is toxic.”
Just as toxic as those who make money from other peoples misery.
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