Health chiefs warn cattle dewormer can’t stop Covid

(Image credit: David Silverman/Getty Images)

published 31 August 2021

The US Food and Drug Agency has warned people not to take an anti-parasitic drug designed for livestock to treat or prevent Covid. Following a surge in reports to the Mississippi Start Department of Health of cases in which people had been poisoned by ingesting the drug Ivermectin, commonly used to de-worm cattle, the FDA tweeted: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

Teen injects himself with mercury to emulate X-Men

A teenage boy has injected himself with lethal mercury in a bid to be like his favourite X-Men superhero. The 15-year-old, who wanted to emulate Mercury from the Marvel world, ended up with painful ulcers that refused to heal. Earlier, he had allowed spiders to bite him in a bid to become like Spider-Man. “Surprisingly, he had no other psychiatric problems and had a normal IQ”, said the National Centre for Biotechnology Information.

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.