GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st March, 2020) Italy's former minister of health, Girolamo Sirchia, recommended that smokers quit amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as smoking significantly reduces the body's protective functions.
"If you quit smoking quickly, tissues start to recover, tissues improve, oxygenation improves because tobacco is a poison and it hurts tissues. If there is no poison anymore, tissues obviously regenerate. Smokers should quit because it is absurd to keep on smoking with pneumonia or bronchitis already in place. But they should quit even before that. Quitting allows you to recover the tropism of the tissues and therefore to face the disease better," Sirchia said in an interview with Sputnik.
Sirchia, who was the minister in the second government of Silvio Berlusconi and dealt with the SARS epidemic in 2003, is known for the ban on smoking in public places.
"It is clear that if an illness comes two days after one quits smoking, this is not enough. If it comes three months later, there is already an advantage, so the advantage is anyway real. One has to decide immediately hoping that the disease won't appear too soon," he added.
Sirchia explained that a smoker's body is affected by chronic bronchitis with chronic inflammation that produces very thick mucus, which is not normally expelled. Therefore, the virus that gets trapped in this mucus does not get expelled, and creates "an inflammation on another inflammation."
Asked about the prospects of using existing medicines for curing coronavirus, such as chloroquine, Avigan or tocilizumab, the former minister, who is also a doctor, said one should not expect a real treatment to appear within a year.
"No conclusion can be drawn because there is no data. There are presumptions that some drugs can improve the situation, but these are isolated cases, these presumptions that come from a small number of experiences that were not supervised, so nobody can claim for sure that they are working. We must make tests. Testing requires a certain method and time, we don't have it, so medicines are being used with a hope that they can do something," he said.
Sirchia noted, however, that it was very easy to delude yourself by such hopes.
"'In my opinion, the closest hope is a vaccine to be made quickly, but it takes a year anyway. It is hard to have a treatment within a year," he added.
On Monday, Italy has registered 1,648 new cases and 812 deaths over the past 24 hours, according to the Civil Protection Department. The total number of cases that the country has had since the beginning of the outbreak is 101,739, and the death toll is at 11,597.
