A picture is being widely shared on social media which shows a screengrab of a report by British public broadcaster BBC.
The headline of the report allegedly published by BBC reads, “Black fungus: Indian scientist find link with cow urine 9,000 cases of rare infection.”
The caption of the post in Bangla reads, ‘মিত্রো! ভারতীয় বিজ্ঞানীরা গো-মুত্রের সাথে ব্ল্যাক-ফাংগাসের সম্পর্ক খুঁজে পেয়েছেন। তবে ভক্তরা আরও বেশি করে পান করুন। আর করোনা কে বিদায় করুন।’.
(Google Translation: Mitro! Indian scientists have found a link between cow urine and black fungus. But fans drink more and say goodbye to Corona.)
Find the above post here. Find similar claims here and here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile did a fact check on the picture and found that the image is morphed.
Our first red flag was the incorrect grammar in the headline. Since it was mentioned ‘Indian scientist’, the following words should have been ‘finds link’ and not ‘find link’. Also, the headline font in the viral post and what is used by BBC appeared distinctly different.
We then continued our investigation by carefully examining the picture and noticed that there were certain discrepancies when we compared the viral picture to a screengrab of a report on the BBC website.
While the feature image of all the reports had image credit/ attributions, no attribution was provided in the feature image of the viral post.
Moreover, we looked for the report in the “India” section of the BBC website but did not find any report remotely close to what was being claimed.
Since the name of the author is mentioned in the viral picture, we further did a search on the BBC website using the author Soutik Biswas’s name but did not find any article related to what was being circulated by him on the website.
We also checked if there are any media reports linking the cause behind the black fungus infection to cow urine but we could not find a single report to substantiate the claim.
We also found a video of Dr. Randeep Guleria, AIIMS Director who stated that Black Fungus infection is found in diabetic patients, people with uncontrolled sugar levels and coronavirus patients who did not use steroids judicially.
The chances of #Mucormycosis infection increase in diabetic patients, people with uncontrolled sugar levels & through misuse of steroids. If a diabetic patient infected with #COVID19 is taking steroids, the chances of fungal infection increase exponentially: Director, AIIMS pic.twitter.com/sigDglhd2X
— PIB India (@PIB_India) May 15, 2021
Hence, our investigation proves that the screengrab of the BBC report is morphed and the claim is fake.
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