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FACT CHECK: Eating Soap Doesn’t Cure COVID-19! Don’t Even Think About It!!
COVID-19 Pandemic has gripped most of the nations around the world with the number of those infected with this deadly disease cause by the novel coronavirus has infected over a million people. It’s an unprecedented global health crisis which has brought the world to a stand-still. COVID-19 has also reached Myanmar with a lot of people testing positive for the deadly disease. In this scenario, the social media is abuzz with weird and sometimes perilous claims of curing COVID-19. We have debunked many a claims misleading people about COVID-19 in the recent weeks and we are going to debunk yet another post of the same kind in this article. Here the claim is that eating soap can cure COVID-19 and people in Malaysia are actually doing this. An account name called “Love H” shared a post with the following caption: “မလေးရှားမှာ ဆပ်ပြာစားရင် COVID-19 ရောဂါပျောက်တယ်ဆိုလို့ စားကုန်ကြပြီ ရုပ်သံဖိုင်”in multiple Facebook groups – translating into English as "In Malaysia, people are eating soap to cure COVID-19”. A link to an article has also been shared in this regard. You can see screenshot showing similar posts below:
A Facebook page named “သုတ“shared a video with caption ““အကိုတို့ ၊ အမတို့ရေ ဆပ်ပြာစားရင် ပျောက်တယ်တဲ့ မလေးရှားမှာ ဆပ်ပြာစားလို့ ပျောက်ကုန်ကြပြီတဲ့... မြန်မာပြည်က လူတွေသိအောင် ရှဲပေးဦး ဟာသအနေနဲ့ တင်တာနော်။တကယ်သွားမလုပ်နဲ့။ ဆပ်ပြာစားလည်း မပျောက်ဘူး..သေသွားလိမ့်မယ်..”, that translates into English as follows: “Brothers and Sisters! If you eat soap, you can cure it (COVID-19) in Malaysia. I am just posting as a joke. The virus will not go away ..You will die ". In the video, a girl is seen as licking soap or something sound similar to soap.
A malicious website "tatinhtoo" shared the video with the well-meaning post we saw above with a misleading caption saying "In Malaysia, if you eat soap, then COVID-19 will be cured.” in English.
Let’s see how soap is effective in fighting COVID-19, which definitely is not by consuming it.
Fact Check
When searching for "eats soap for COVID 19" on Google, we come across a post from Live Science where expert tells soap is a toxic substance to the human body. Benjamin Chapman, a professor and food safety specialist at North Carolina State University told Live Science that "We've known for 60 years that there are toxicity issues about consuming household dish soaps.” He also claim that "Drinking dish soap or eating it can lead to nausea, can lead to [an] upset stomach. It's not a compound that our stomach is really built to deal with."
World Health Organization (WHO) has iterated that there is no vaccine and no specific antiviral medicine to prevent or treat COVID-19. Those affected should receive care to relive symptoms. People with serious illness should be hospitalized. Most patients recover thanks to supportive care.
WHO suggests that the most effective ways to protect yourself and others against COVID-19 are to frequently and thoroughly clean your hands, cover your cough with the bend of elbow or tissue and maintain a distance of at least 1 meter (3 feet) from the people who cough or sneeze.
WHO has also further clarified that while some western medicine, traditional or home remedies may provide comfort and alleviate symptoms of COVID-19, there is no evidence that current medicine prevent or cure the disease. WHO does not recommend self-medication with any medicines including antibiotics as a prevention or cure for COVID-19.
The only way soap is helpful in fighting COVID-19 is when you use it for washing your hands. The novel Coronavirus is made up of lipids and single strand RNA. These lipids dissolve in fats and thus when you wash your hands with soap you can wash off the novel Coronavirus with the help of fats in the soap and by friction caused by movement of water.
Conclusion
As we have seen, eating soap doesn’t cure COVID-19 also it is toxic and not fit for human consumption. Please be careful about the misinformation around COVID-19 and share content from credible and verified sources. If you have doubt about any content you have received on Whatsapp or your Facebook feed and you want us to verify it, then please send it to our Whatsapp number +95 9 40709 9077.
Title:FACT CHECK: Eating Soap Doesn’t Cure COVID-19! Don’t Even Think About It!!
Fact Check By: Zaw WaiResult: False
