US President Donald Trump has suggested studying the injection of disinfectant as a COVID-19 treatment.
, Such a step was met by bewilderment and rejection., “We must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route),” the makers of household detergents Lysol and Dettol wrote on April 24 in a statement headlined “Improper Use of Disinfectants.”, Dr Jason McKnight, a physician at Texas A&M university, warned of a dire result if disinfectant was taken by humans., “Doing anything other than what is written on the labels for these chemicals can be not only dangerous but also deadly,” he told AFP, referring to patients who had “injected things they shouldn’t have.”, “All these chemicals, very few of them can be metabolized by the body and hence can be simply poison when introduced into the body,” McKnight added., “The instances that I think back to, these people ended up in the intensive care unit on a lot of antibiotics, and sometimes on other mechanical life support to keep them alive.”, Kim Barrett, Distiguished Professor of Medicine at the University of California, said: “It would be disastrous to inject bleach or disinfectant into the body.\xa0 These are non-specific ways to kill living cells.\xa0 So they would not discriminate and would kill human cells too.\xa0 In fact, a major medical emergency occurs if people drink bleach.\xa0 It destroys cells that line the mouth, esophagus and stomach (basically by chemically burning them) and results in bleeding, chest pain, coma and potentially death.”, Nina Yamanis, an expert in health policy at American University’s school of international service, told AFP the public had unfortunately already shown during the novel coronavirus pandemic\xa0a propensity to believe claims made by the president., “We saw that with hydroxychloroquine,” she said, referring to an Arizona man who died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, an aquarium cleaning product similar to the drug currently on trial as a possible COVID-19 treatment., “It’s very dangerous for the public to hear these ideas and think that they might work,” Yamanis added., Trump made his remarks about disinfectant after a presentation by William Bryan, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting undersecretary for science and technology, who said that tests showed disinfectants such as bleach or alcohol can kill the coronavirus on surfaces., Unlike Trump, Bryan did not speculate about their use inside the human body., The presentation also mentioned that heat, humidity, and sunlight can decrease the lifespan of the virus. Bryan concluded that summer-like conditions "will create an environment (where) transmission can be decreased," while acknowledging that summer would not completely kill the virus., In response, Trump suggested conducting tests on the virus using "ultraviolet or just very powerful light”, again, inside the body. A study using certain types of ultraviolet light has shown positive results with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), another type of coronavirus, but not COVID-19, the disease that has swept the world since emerging in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019., , Copyright © AFP 2017-2020.  All rights reserved.  Users can access and consult this website and use the share features available for personal, private, and non-commercial purposes.  Any other use, in particular any reproduction, communication to the public or distribution of the content of this website, in whole or in part, for any other purpose and/or by any other means, without a specific licence agreement signed with AFP, is strictly prohibited.  The subject matter depicted or included via links within the Fact Checking content is provided to the extent necessary for correct understanding of the verification of the information concerned.  AFP has not obtained any rights from the authors or copyright owners of this third party content and shall incur no liability in this regard.  AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.
Trump's idea to treat COVID-19 with disinfectant could cause deaths | AFP Fact Check