Skip to main content

‘Imitinef Mercilet’ curing Blood Cancer!! Hoax


I just received a mail in the mail Which is is as follows:
 Dear All,

Please send to your colleagues and friends as many you can. Do not delete without sending to anybody.
I have forwarded it to the maximum I can.
Let it reach the 110 crores Indians and the remaining if any.
‘Imitinef Mercilet’ is a medicine which cures blood cancer. Its available free of cost at “Adyar Cancer Institute in Chennai”. Create Awareness. It might help someone.  
Forward to as many as u can, kindness costs  nothing.
Just revealing a fact about this.

Please don’t forward this without being ignorant as this seems to be a hoax. This seemed too good to be true so I googled a little and found out the following:

According to this message, India’s Adyar Cancer Institute is distributing, free of charge, a medicine named ‘Imitinef Mercilet’ that cures blood cancer. The message is circulating rapidly via email and is also making its way around the Internet via blogs, forums and social networking websites.
The Adyar Cancer Institute is a real health facility located in the city of Chennai, India and, as its name implies, it indeed specializes in cancer treatment and research. The Adyar Cancer Institute has achieved great results in the treatment and research of cancer since its establishment in 1954.
I contacted a spokesperson at the Adyar Cancer Institute to ask about the veracity of the message. He sent me the following reply:
Only the Part of this message is true. The medicine Imitinef is available free for only qualified persons and not for all. It is free for those who have admitted in the hospital for treatment.
‘Imitinef Mercilet’ is apparently an alternative spelling of the drug Imatinib mesylate which is used in the treatment of some forms of leukemia along with other types of cancer. Imatinib, often referred to a “Gleevec”, has proved to be an effective treatment for some forms of cancers. However, “blood cancer” is a generalized term for cancers that affect the blood, lymphatic system or bone marrow. The three types of blood cancer are listed as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. These three malignancies require quite different kinds of treatments. While drugs (including Imatinib), along with other treatments such as radiation can help to slow or even stop the progress of these cancers, there is currently no single drug treatment that can be said to actually cure all such cancers.
Moreover, it should be noted that Imatinib is available for cancer patients in many different health facilities around the world, not just the Adyar Cancer Institute.
Thus, although there are some elements of truth to this message, its is also potentially misleading and contains inaccurate information.
According to this message, India’s Adyar Cancer Institute is distributing, free of charge, a medicine named ‘Imitinef Mercilet’ that cures blood cancer. The message is circulating rapidly via email and is also making its way around the Internet via blogs, forums and social networking websites.
The Adyar Cancer Institute is a real health facility located in the city of Chennai, India and, as its name implies, it indeed specializes in cancer treatment and research. The Adyar Cancer Institute has achieved great results in the treatment and research of cancer since its establishment in 1954.
I contacted a spokesperson at the Adyar Cancer Institute to ask about the veracity of the message. He sent me the following reply:
Only the Part of this message is true. The medicine Imitinef is available free for only qualified persons and not for all. It is free for those who have admitted in the hospital for treatment.
‘Imitinef Mercilet’ is apparently an alternative spelling of the drug Imatinib mesylate which is used in the treatment of some forms of leukemia along with other types of cancer. Imatinib, often referred to a “Gleevec”, has proved to be an effective treatment for some forms of cancers. However, “blood cancer” is a generalized term for cancers that affect the blood, lymphatic system or bone marrow. The three types of blood cancer are listed as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. These three malignancies require quite different kinds of treatments. While drugs (including Imatinib), along with other treatments such as radiation can help to slow or even stop the progress of these cancers, there is currently no single drug treatment that can be said to actually cure all such cancers.
Moreover, it should be noted that Imatinib is available for cancer patients in many different health facilities around the world, not just the Adyar Cancer Institute.
Thus, although there are some elements of truth to this message, its is also potentially misleading and contains inaccurate information.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at

April Fool and Google Part 2: A Round Up of ALL of Google’s April Fools Jokes

Ok....this post I think will contain all of the pranks I could find  for today. After my last post here http://rkrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-fool-and-google-my-favorite.html Last Time I reported Only a handful of the pranks.. Understandable, as it was only the morning. After that I stumbled upon more of them Which I am gonna round up here. Now staring with the list. The very first one is obviously our favourite Google Maps Quest The above is their official video. In a post in Google Plus they say about it as follows  Today  + Google Maps  announced Google Maps 8-bit for NES. With #8bitmaps , you can do everything you'd normally do in Maps—search for famous landmarks and sites around the world, get directions and even use Street View. Just in time for April Fool's Day, Google has introduced Google Maps Quest, a retro 8-bit version of its mapping tool that is... totally awesome. In a characteristically whimsical video, available above, Google emplo

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have my ow