Ayna Garayeva, a teacher in the capital of authoritarian and secretive Turkmenistan, began taking extra sanitary measures in her classroom when the government issued new COVID-19 guidelines in August.
As well as standard COVID-19 precautions like temperature checks for students, she started fumigating her classroom with the smoke of a herb beloved by the ex-Soviet country’s leader.
“We are following the instructions as they are laid out,” 42-year-old Garayeva said.
Photo: AFP
In tightly controlled Turkmenistan, which still insists that it has no COVID-19 cases, the pandemic has led to a boom in a herb whose Turkmen name translates as “medicine for a hundred illnesses.”
Wild rue — known locally as yuzerlik — has for millennia been popular in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia as a panacea for sickness and ill fortune.
Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, a strongman leader and former dentist, has gone a step further. In March, he ordered wild rue burning on a “systematic level,” trumpeting its bacteria and infection-killing qualities.
At the same time, authorities continued to hold mass events and deter citizens from wearing masks.
Since the diktat, the cost of a wild rue bundle has grown fivefold to 5 manats (US$1.43).
In neighboring Uzbekistan, Bakhrom Almatov, Chief Doctor of the Republican Center of State Sanitary-Epidemiology Surveillance, said that the herb has “no direct effect” on viruses, despite having healthy properties.
“After use, many people start sneezing. When they sneeze, the body expels dust that has fallen into it,” Almatov told local media.
The WHO declined to comment on wild rue specifically, but said that traditional medicine in many countries “is often an important health resource with many applications.”
Berdimuhamedov joins the leader of Madagascar, who gained notoriety for promoting a scientifically unproven herbal virus remedy at home and abroad. Herbal remedies have been widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries with struggling public health systems, like Yemen and Sierra Leone.
Yet Berdimuhamedov’s approach to the pandemic changed after the WHO visited in July. The delegation stopped short of dismissing his boast that the country had zero cases, a claim now only shared by North Korea and a handful of island states.
The WHO recommended that Turkmenistan adopt measures as if COVID-19 “were already circulating.”
WHO Europe Director Hans Kluge tweeted weeks later that the group had “expressed serious concern about [a rise] in #COVID19 negative pneumonia” during a teleconference with Berdimuhamedov.
Kluge said that the Turkmen government agreed to allow the WHO to sample COVID-19 tests and send them to WHO laboratories.
Since the July visit, non-food shops and restaurants across Turkmenistan have been shuttered and mask-wearing regime was put in place to counter “dust” and unspecified “pathogens.”
However, Turkmenistan has yet to cooperate with the WHO’s request for confirmatory testing.
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