Health authorities on Monday assured alarmed people over the safety of Covid-19 tests after claims in social media that the swabs used in the tests are covered in a cancer-causing chemical.
Ethylene oxide which is used in the swabs messes with a person’s DNA and it literally changes the structure of the building blocks of one’s own body, according to the fast-spreading claims.
However, the Ministry of Health and experts strongly refute the claims with Associate Professor of Pharmacology Christos Petrou telling Philenews the limit of detection of a method has nothing to do with permissible limits. It has to do with the sensitivity of the method used instead, he added.
“The reported method of analysis concerns food and not medical equipment…the method is not validated and the analysis results (released by a private laboratory) as for seed control e.g. sesame for the presence of ethylene oxide,” he also said.
“Therefore, the use of a method that is not validated for this purpose automatically renders the analysis invalid,” he added.
