The water and soap is the perfect advise for washing your hands so as not to get infected with the coronavirus. As people are rushing with cleaning everything amid fears of catching the pandemic, a video went viral on social media, advising people to wash the food with water and soap.
Live Science had asked doctors and experts about this, and they advised NOT to do that and said it was a very much bad idea.
"We've known for 60 years that there are toxicity issues about consuming household dish soaps," Benjamin Chapman, a professor and food safety specialist at North Carolina State University, told Live Science. "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."
Instead, people should wash produce as they normally would, with cold water, Chapman said.
Dr. Jeffrey VanWingen, who works in private practice as a family doctor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, posted the video to YouTube on March 24. Since then, it's been seen about 16.5 million times.
"I felt an urgency to get the word out to people that despite the stay-at-home order [in Michigan], we need to use caution when we go out," VanWingen told Live Science. "That's really the most important piece of the message: If you don't have to go out, don't. But if you must, to get food, do so with caution."
https://youtu.be/sjDuwc9KBps
In the video, he advises people to spend as little time in the grocery store as possible, to wipe down shopping carts with disinfectant. He also advised people to keep new groceries in a garage or porch for at least three days, if possible. A recent study, in the New England Journal of Medicine , however, suggested that the virus could stay on cardboard for 24 hours and plastic and stainless steel for 72 hours, although the overall concentration fell significantly by that time. But the practice of quarantining and then sanitizing food containers before putting them in the refrigerator or pantry isn't necessary, Chapman said.
"We don't have any evidence that food or food packaging are transmission vehicles for coronavirus," Chapman said.
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