Just keeping an open mind during this whole Coronavirus pandemic / COVID-19 / Shelter in Place. I actually liked the questions about Ultraviolet Sun Rays (radiation) and disinfectants – possibly internally washing surfaces. As a teacher of medicine and surgery, I would definitely welcome these questions, and I hope to give reasonable answers. Basically, if UV light kills viruses, and disinfectant kills viruses easily, why don’t we use them more in the human body?Regarding UV light, the radiation mutates the virus to death, but it will also mutate our own cells, and thus leading to our own mutated cells like cancer. But yes, we have given radiation to certain areas of the body in hopes that the problem is more sensitive to destruction (like cancer cells) than our own normal cells and we also hope that any damaged normal cells can recover. Disinfectants kill germs, but they are so powerful they will kill our normal cells as well. Regular disinfectants are pretty nonspecific. On our skin (which is considered outside of the body) like our hands, we have layers of skin including a dead layer of skin (stratum corneum) that protect us from the disinfectant (like hand sanitizer) which an damage our “live” inside cells. The stratum corneum is like a tough shield. When bypassing the skin and we go Inside the body (by swallowing, injecting, or inserting), we’ve had to come up with more delicate and targeted approaches to “disinfecting” such as antibiotics which target specific things in these alien bacteria invaders, and antivirals – these drugs which are injected are targeting structures and processes which humans cells don’t normally possess. Our mucosa, which includes the inside of our mouth and noses, are considered to be inside the body and does not have the protection of skin and stratum corneum. These areas are much more delicate. Off the shelf disinfectants will be harmful in these areas to our own cells. Disinfectants will harm germs and harm our own cells in these areas. Who knows, it’s questions like this that can make us think, and even revisit old ideas. Dr. John Porteous, a prominent surgeon who brought me to Modesto, has shown me something that he does when closing very infected abdominal wounds from trauma or from ruptures, he would paint the wound with Betadeine (which is a disinfectant), in the hopes that the wound wouldn’t get infected in it’s troubled post operative course due to existing infection. We may still leave the top part of the wound open for debridement. Sounds interesting enough, and when desperate enough to help the patient, we would try it, or try diluting the betadeine to lessen the toxicity to normal cells. Dr. Porteous and other surgeons have jokingly called this Betadeine tea. I’ll admit that I’ve tried it a few times… so I have been guilty of applying disinfectant to large infected surgical incisions that otherwise seem doomed to fail. Disclaimer: For now, don’t swallow the sun, and don’t inject off the shelf disinfectants.
Coronovirus links to statistics – especially California COVID-19 data.
I inject Botox not Clorox, so I am not super qualified to discuss disinfectants.
