Coronavirus: Italian study adds heat to debate over steam therapy
- Researchers say home remedy might be able to speed up recovery but their findings are only preliminary
- Paediatricians have warned that steam therapy has corresponded to a big increase in the number of children with burns
“This simple approach … might help easing the consequences of Sars-CoV-2 infection, if applied early in at-risk individuals in whatever healthcare setting, especially in low-income countries with limited access to equipped hospitals or intensive care units,” said the team led by Dr Giancarlo La Marca with the University of Florence in a paper published in the journal Life Sciences on Saturday.
The researchers qualified their findings, saying the results were preliminary because of the small scale of the experiment. The method also needed to be applied at the very early stage of infection, when the patient might not even be aware of having the virus, they said.
Heat appears to be a factor in the stability of the coronavirus. Its genes are in single-stranded ribonucleic acid with a relatively unstable structure that breaks down easily in a hot environment.
Some studies have also found that the virus’s spike proteins tend to point inward and bind less easily with host cells as temperatures rise.
La Marca’s team wanted to see if heat could be used to fight the pandemic.
They recruited 10 doctors and nurses immediately after they were found positive in routine testing programmes.
The volunteers put their face over steaming water with a towel over their head for four minutes, five times in an hour for four days in a row. The temperature of the steam was 55-65 degrees Celsius (131-149 degrees Fahrenheit).