Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian presidential candidate for the Workers Party ruling coalition underwent a battery of exams and tests at São Paulo’s most advanced hospital confirming she has overcome the lymphoma detected last year.
According to daily Folha de S. Paulo Ms Rousseff was exposed to electronic resonance and imagery tests at the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital of São Paulo.
“Tests have shown she has overcome and is cured of the lymphoma”, said a doctor from the hospital quoted by the newspaper.
Ms Rousseff in 2009 went into several sessions of chemotherapy treatment with which she managed to overcome the lymphatic cancer, following which she begun her presidential campaign for October 3 elections.
The candidate handpicked by Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was cared for by a team of doctors and specialists composed by Roberto Kalil Filho, Paulo Hoff and Yana Augusta Sarkis Novis, the same group that last week begun treatment of Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo, who also has a lymphoma although a bit more extended, “but with sufficient time for a positive treatment”.
Ms Rousseff leads comfortably in the opinion polls for October with a difference of at least eleven points over her most important contender and former governor and mayor of São Paulo, José Serra.
She recently participated together with Serra and the Green Party candidate Marina Silva of the first Internet presidential debate considered a success since 50 million Brazilians are believed to have followed the event.
With the extraordinary popularity and support from President Lula da Silva who likes to say Dilma is ‘his incarnation and guarantee of continuity’, the incumbent candidate is poised to become Brazil’s first woman president.
Next October 3 she must garner 50% plus one of ballots, if not there will be a runoff at the end of the month most probably between Dilma and Serra.
