Coronavirus: With officials' backing, dubious virus remedies surge in Latin America

TARIJA, BOLIVIA - In Cochabamba, high in the Bolivian Andes, people line up daily outside pharmacies on the central plaza, eager to buy the scarce elixir they hope will ward off Covid-19: chlorine dioxide, a kind of bleach used to disinfect swimming pools and floors.

Even in the United States, President Donald Trump has promoted treatments that scientists said are useless. Covid-19 has battered already-fragile healthcare systems, and lockdown measures have devastated economies without bringing the virus under control. Even so, in the small town of Nauta, in the Peruvian Amazon, the local government and religious groups went so far as to give veterinary ivermectin to adults and children as young as four, according to local media and a human rights group.

In Brazil, with the world's second-highest coronavirus caseload and death toll after the United States, President Jair Bolsonaro has relentlessly promoted the drug - even after he himself developed Covid-19, despite taking the drug for months. In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro's government, which is struggling to provide even running water and soap to crumbling hospitals, has boasted of obtaining from its ally Cuba tens of thousands of doses of a drug, interferon alfa-2b, used against viruses and cancers, to fight the pandemic. Government clinics now require patients with coronavirus symptoms to take the drug.

The US Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly said it has no medical value and can have potentially lethal effects, including"severe vomiting, severe diarrhoea, life-threatening low blood pressure caused by dehydration and acute liver failure". After successfully containing the disease for months, Bolivia, one of Latin America's poorest countries, succumbed to an aggressive outbreak this month that has overwhelmed hospitals.

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