Indian nationalists peddle something worse than snake oil. It’s the The Cow Dung Cure for Coronavirus.
Swami Chakrapani Maharaj, president of the Hindu Mahasabha—a century-old organization that advocates Hindutva (or “Hinduness”)—declared that “consuming cow urine and cow dung will stop the effect of infectious coronavirus.” The swami added that a “person who chants ‘om namah shivay’ and applies cow dung” on his body “will be saved.” The Sanskrit chant is a salutation to Shiva, a Hindu deity.
The swami is a prominent figure in hard-line Hindu circles and has an ideological affinity with Mr. Modi.
Since the Hinduist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, ascended to national power in 2014, its views have infiltrated textbooks and even scientific discourse. Mr. Modi has suggested that ancient Indians had test-tube babies. Citing the case of Karna—a hero of the “Mahabharata,” a Hindu epic from the third century B.C.—Mr. Modi told a gathering of doctors in 2014 that since Karna was “not born from his mother’s womb” (in Mr. Modi’s version of the myth), this had to mean that “genetic science was present at the time.” Referring to Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, he said, there “must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being.”
Mr. Modi is too smart to believe all this. He spoke those words because he knew they would delight his nationalist base. His fellow travelers routinely resort to pseudoscientific assertions in the service of Indian glory. Among the claims: Indians beat Pythagoras by 300 years to the theorem that bears his name; nuclear weapons were used in the great war depicted in the “Mahabharata”; and ancient Indians flew airplanes.
India’s Path of Ruin
India is on the path of destruction with Modi in charge.
This is yet another example that shows the importance of separation of church and state.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
In Nordic countries during the postulated time of Beowulf, Bull urine was widely known as an effective disinfectant for wounds….
I am more afraid of Samimodi Virus.
Well Mish, he is after all a republican, or what passes for Indian republicanism.
This is some low-tier trashy journalism on display, by an author who clearly doesn’t know much about India.
The picture is of the Prime Minister. The comment was made by the head of a fringe group that has no say in the executive branch. And yet the headline reads “India’s leaders….”
“India is on the path of destruction with Modi in charge” Is it really though? Because Americans come here in droves for medical tourism, and investment opportunities. Besides he’s been re-elected twice in the world’s biggest democracy. Surely people wouldn’t vote for their own destruction.
there is proof to the claim that indians preceded pythagoras (Aryabhatt) and that there were ancient advances in surgery (Sushruta) Look it up.
Right, and yet thousands of years later they are still pooping on the ground and eating shit with the chickens.
There are as many top 1% brains in India, as there are people combined in Switzerland and Singapore, perhaps the two countries most famous for “medical tourism.” At least for those who can afford to go there…. So yes, India has tonloads of smart people. In every field.
Of course, they also have 100 times as many morons as the other two combined. Hence, Modi….
Has there ever been a “people” who ever voted for anything other than their own destruction? Their own destruction, at the hands of Dear Leaders, from Greek Senators to Adolf to Peron to the rest of them, is exactly what people vote for. Not something else.
Don’t they wash their clothes in it also? What a bunch of nasty bastards. I’m surprised this crap isn’t on walmart’s shelves yet.
Don’t Americans breed within their own families and go around shooting schoolkids?
of course you guys don’t. But this is what you sound like, you stereotype junkie.
and by the way, Walmart is sucking the Indian government’s dick to be allowed to set up shop here.
Teehee. I think you just “dropped the mic”…..
Said one untouchable to another!
In Australia clothing that is manufactured in Bangladesh and India is tagged with a warning label to WASH BEFORE USE! Because it is in fact loaded with pathogens.
God men preying on poor, highly superstitious and religious population enjoy a luxurious life of wealth, sex, fame and political patronage in India.
Just like in the US.
Yeah right, wapo/wsj/nyt/bbc/cnn/grauniad etc…
When it comes to India/Modi especially Hindus,
why not go straight to the really authoritative people;
pakstan, ish#t (aka isis), evanjihadis, the pope, catholic church,communists
You will really learn a great deal
Look in your own country and see what ethnic/religious group has highest education/per capita income levels and lowest incarceration levels.
Same goes for the uk
But please do keep your Modi/Hindu hatred boiling…..
It will become a raging boil.
As the number of people with an education and high per capita income multiply, all under Modi
Church and state is separate India… Just as in “christian” countries
but maybe not “islamic” countries
Believe it or not, smearing yourself in human feces or bathing in urine were rumored cures for the plague in the 1340’s.
As was quarantine, oddly.
(Rats were blamed for spread, but are not well known for obeying quarantine rules).
Might even have worked if you used enough to keep the fleas from biting you. Oh and where did bubonic plague come from? INDIA! Trade between India and Constantinople is how it got into Europe.
No wonder their lunar landing craft crashed.
We reached Mars at a fraction of the cost NASA spent, and didn’t fake the moon landing unlike…
How many US missions have crashed? How many have resulted in deaths? What’s the cost of the US missions compared to the Indian missions?
“Mr. Modi is too smart to believe all this.”
No, he is not.
If, on the off chance he does not believe it, it is in no way, shape nor form because he is too smart to. Dude’s a moron. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be fronting “the world’s largest democracy.”
Per Mencken:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
That great and glorious day fully and completely arrived with Nixon’s decoupling from Gold, and other central banks following The Fed’s lead off the cliff.
Here, there, in Modistan and everywhere. In not only governments and so called “public” institutions, but also in nominally “private” ones. It truly is downright morons., all the way down, and all the way across. With the only possible exceptions being of the “even a broken clock….” variety.
If humans ever have a nuclear war it will start on the India Pakistan border and if not by Modi by one of his other ignorant successors.
Sounds like bullshit, but urine contains antineoplastons and drinking urine has been used to cure cancer for sometime. There is a clinic in Texas where it has been used for several years. I think it is called the Byrzenski clinic.
Antineoplastins are not accepted as a “thing” outside of the fringes though, are they?
I did read that drinking urine can increase vitamin absorption (as in drinking your wife’s urine gives you access to vitamins that her body didn’t need). But i think I’ll stick to pills.
“Mr. Modi is too smart to believe all this.”
Probably. Likewise, Pompeo & Pence are too smart to believe in The Rapture. In fact, John Hagee is too smart to believe it. He just rakes it in from his followers and laughs himself sick as he counts their money.
But, the next time I hear something about how crazy Iranian Shiites are for believing the 12th Imam will return, I’ll remind the storyteller about Modi. At least we’re not talking about war with India.
If we can believe WHO, there’s only been one death reported outside China since Feb 2nd on the 205 cases reported outside China for at least two weeks now. That should begin to raise eyebrows if it persists a couple more days. There should be@4 /day dying at this point. Either they’re all on cow piss, younger,(Ave. age of deaths is 56 yrs.), or they’re getting better care.
I think it’s clear that the hospitals in Wuhan were overwhelmed. The death rate everywhere else has been much lower. How low will it turn out to be? Your case is as good as mine. If it takes 2 weeks or so to die, two weeks ago there were about 100 cases outside of China.
They actually just VASTLY increased the number of sick and dead from coronavirus, called it a change to the way they count and classify things, in other words they were calling the deaths pneumonia, now calling it what it is, and it is still being grossly undercounted. They will be finding bodies in apartments long dead for months. Those will be “heart attacks” no doubt. Same as all other Asian accounting.
Americans have been eating bullsh*t from Congress and the DNC for years now and many don’t even know it. It’s now a main course in every American’s diet.
I concur , this treatment has a good success rate: when you die from cow urine, you likely won’t contract the corona virus.
Poor vegans though, they are going to have no chance at all. YIPPEE!
Ridiculing is always so fckn easy… but, what if they re right ? ….Never say never ! Even flu vaccines are pure ‘shit’ injected into our veins , aren t they ?
Really?
REALLLY?
Do you hear yourself?
Fecal is just a PC name for poop
Not that recent. Fell out of favour, but not recent. Hitler used to have them.
No, FECES/FECAL is just the clinical term for shit. Fecal transplants are not so much shit transplants as they are biome transplants from one person to another. Some people because their own immune system attacks gut bacteria very efficiently , or because of prolonged use of drugs, particularly antibiotics which kill your gut biome, need to have those biotics restored. You cannot live without them. Our guts only do a small part of the work of finer food digestion, most of the work is done by the germs in the bowel. And, in many cases some of the bacteria actually excrete into our systems what you would call drugs, compunds we have a hard time doing without.
For example, lactobacillus reuteri. It used to be in nearly all people prior to WWII, now it is only found in about 20% of us. Studies have shown that without it rats are prone to obesity and early death with far smaller gonads and lower sperm counts. Guess what other species has gotten obese with a 40% drop in sperm counts? Right. And the worst part is you can suppliment with it, but, it is expensive, and the germ does not survive stomach acids well. Once you have lost your L. Reuteri colony you can never get it back without continuous supplimentation. The best and current L reuteri was isolated from the breast milk of Peruvian women.
The odd thing about these transplants is that if you take a perfectly healthy person with all the markers of good health and vigor (called SUPER-DONORS), their feces can greatly rejuvenate people that are sickly and not in good health. ANd transplant has connotations that are inappropriate here.
Those are medical facts. Drinking cattle pee has no health benefits at all. But then some people will try anything, like giving their babies Clorox because some preacher said it would keep their sons from being gay. Some things we can study and fix, but you can’t fix stupid.
No.
Fecal |Transplant benefits:
A fecal transplant is when a doctor transplants feces from a healthy donor into another person to restore the balance of bacteria in their gut. Fecal transplants may help treat gastrointestinal infections and other conditions.
And Fecal is just the medical name for Poop
And this has what to do with the story?
If poop can help cure diseases, why can’t urine?
I doubt you were looking for a serious answer, but I will give you one. Humans have a symbiotic relationship with the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut that is not fully understood, but it is known that they can affect our health, our mood, and our ability to process nutrients. What we eat affects the balance of out gut biome, because the bacteria that prefer whatever we eat thrive, while bacteria that prefer something else die off. People who eat very primitive diets may have millions of different types, while people who eat a diet of primarily processed foods have far, far fewer types. Taking a probiotic pill with 30 types of bacteria will temporarily boost those 30 types, but can’t restore the million types we once had. In the end, we don’t know the ideal balance of bacteria that are useful, anyway.
This brings us to the fecal transplant. In experiments in rats, if they take an older rat, and kill the bacteria in it’s gut, and replace it with the gut biome of young, healthy rats, it rejuvenates the older rat, and restores it’s health, and it acts young again. Of course, if it continues to eat the same diet it ate before, it’s gut biome will go back to the bad one it had before, so it’s only a temporary solution. Could it work in humans? Perhaps. I believe it is done in humans now, in cases of severe gastrointestinal problems.
Urine doesn’t contain the bacteria from the gut biome, so drinking it would not be useful for this problem. Eating cow dung would also not be a good plan. You would get bacteria, but which ones? Good one? Bad ones? Instead, if done at all, it should be done with a carefully selected pool of bacteria.
In the end, my advice is to eat a diverse diet, and one with a lot of fiber, and that will encourage the diverse, healthy gut biome. Occasionally eating fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kim chee, or yogurt may also be helpful. Also, don’t eat too many detergents, er emulsifiers.
Good advice, and to add that fecal transplants are NOT new and the answer to “could it work in humans” was answered during WW2, when Africakorps soldiers suffering from dysentery were given camel dung after somebody noticed that locals who started eating it, fared rather better.
In fact, it was practiced for thousands of years, but I doubt any modern scientist would pay attention to that. But WW2 was a bit of a turning point, I gather.
Because fecal matter is LOADED with gut bactria we need to survive. Pee is not. They extract the feces with a needle, and then iject it into the gut of others, to restore your biome. It would not work to simply stick a shit covered finger into your own rectum, these are upper digestive bugs that are being replaced. There are far more bacterial cells in your body than there are human cells in your body. Antibiotics destroy whole classifications of those, and many never come back.
Great. We can fight the flu, Wuhan virus and soon the Indian Bovine virus simultaneously.
Please mish dont fall for the liberal media. The headline and the article have no relation. The PM did not say it cures, this is what Trump calls fake news. All the person said was put cow dung and call gods name to be healed. Any religious person says the same thing. Dont you think muslims say pray to allah and you will be healed. Or pray to christ and you will be saved. Religious are stupid. Not the religion.
It’s a hit piece against nationalists.
Quick google search clarified quite a bit. Hit piece, indeed.
Looked up some reports. No report that Modi claimed it, but numerous reports that the Swami did.
“Please mish dont fall for the liberal media. The headline and the article have no relation. The PM did not say it cures”
Did you read what I said, or the article?
Neither of us claimed the PM said that.
But the PM did make absurd statements,
Correct?
Mish, I generally am a fan of your posts and analysis. But I am surprised at this one. To reply precisely to your Q’s above:
“Neither of us claimed the PM said that”
Really? What do you think is the message sent by this –
“India’s Leaders Claim Drinking Cow Urine Will Cure the Coronavirus” followed by a large picture of Modi? The swami who said those words is one of hundreds of such people who say manuy such things in Indian media. Modi is a recognized leader. What’s the message you think your readers will get from this way of putting things?
The other quotes are from discussions with doctors, not from a national speech or anything like it. Could be dismissed as harmless speculation, maybe motivational to the audience.
BTW, there is documentary evidence of the use of the pythagorean equation by indian mathematicians and architects many years before it was formulated by Pythagoras.
The statement that “India is on the path of destruction with Modi in charge.” does not befit you Mish.
More likely India is on a path of a great, historic revival under Modi. Rediscovering its roots while casting off the colonial slave mindset of the last 100 years.
LOL LIBERAL MEDIA! Considering there is no reference source for the article at the head of this post you really have a nice fat brass set of balls assuming it is LIBERAL MEDIA. My guess is it is from your favorite russian GRU troll farm poster.
Let me assure you it works. The smell of processed cow urine is mind bending. When the virus comes close to a regular urine drinker, it will die a horrible death smelling him. Those that survive will flee the host at utmost speed to escape similar fate. Indians will never be cow-ed down by this or any other virus! 🙂
The politicians will not rest till they ensure our salvation lies with the pharmaceuticals … and the tens (hundreds?) of $billions they will make (and kick back some to the pols, naturally) for cure / vaccine.
Horses were used to cure diphtheria https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2013/08/how-horses-helped-cure-diphtheria.html
Thank you for the very interesting link. I knew that we vaccinate for it today, but did not know about the history.
It’s good for breakfast too: https://i.imgur.com/qEAAmDP.jpg