Coronavirus Adds to Brazil’s Public Health Pileup
Resources are already thinly spread to fight dengue, HIV and other scourges.
Mr. and Mrs. Dengue are still flying.
Photographer: Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images
Fittingly for a region where maladies flourish, everyone in Latin America seems to have a remedy for the spread of the coronavirus. A Venezuelan lawmaker recommends pepper and honey with a twist of lemon. Other sois disant healers swear by avocado tea with mint. For the Global Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, an evangelical order in southern Brazil, there’s no prophylactic like “the power of God.”
All the better for coronavirus, which thrives amid crowd-sourced misinformation. The Brazilian health ministry, encouragingly, launched a website to dispel such charlatanism, while the Chilean fact-checking outfit El Poligrafo has taken aim at the fast spreading fakery.