Claim: Drinking a concoction of ginger, garlic, lime, paracetamol and lemon-ginger tea cures coronavirus
Source: KwakyeOnline Facebook page
Verdict: FALSE
Researched by Rabiu Alhassan
A video viewed more than 19,000 times on Facebook urges people to drink a concoction of ginger, garlic, lime, paracetamol and lemon-ginger tea to cure the novel coronavirus.
The video was posted on April 11 by an entertainment page, KwakyeOnline, with the title- “This is how I cured my mother who tested positive of COVID-19.”
Concoction
The 2 minutes 58 seconds long video features a man displaying the process for preparing the concoction, which involves blending “ginger, garlic and lime” into a paste before mixing it into a cup of hot lemon ginger tea (2 bags).
The speaker said his mother took the mixture for “3 days and after that mommy is COVID-19 negative.”
According to him, the home-made mixture was “what I used when my mother was tested positive for COVID-19 and I think it is important that you use it.”
Fact-check
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “there are currently no drugs licensed for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”
“Garlic is a healthy food that may have some antimicrobial properties. However, there is no evidence from the current outbreak that eating garlic has protected people from the new coronavirus,” the specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health noted on the myth-busters page of its website.
Limes are high in vitamin C and antioxidants— both of which may offer health benefits, “while the impact of ginger on the respiratory system is known. But that does not mean that ginger on its own will cure very bad pneumonia,” the General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) Dr Justice Yankson stated in an interview with GhanaFact.
He explained that “the mild form of the disease[coronavirus] your body will actually overcome it depending on how good your immunity is. So those who took this particular concoction and got well were they in this category or they were in the severe/critical category…Severe/critical cases have [people] going on ventilators and their organs like the liver and kidney are shutting down, you cannot say the concoction will resolve all these problems.”
Conclusion
The claim that drinking a concoction of ginger, garlic, lime, paracetamol and lemon-ginger tea cures coronavirus is false.
