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Austin emergency room doctors urge people not to ingest disinfectants

While some emergency rooms across the country have seen an influx of patients consuming bleach, local emergency room doctors advise caution.

AUSTIN, Texas — Austin emergency room doctors are urging people not to consume bleach, following a comment made by President Donald Trump this week, in regards to combating the coronavirus. 

Dr. Natasha Kathuria at Austin Emergency Center said it's always concerning when these kinds of trends surface, because it can be deadly. 

She said just like HIV, herpes, influenza and other viruses, the coronavirus is hard to treat and therefore causing people to resort to desperate measures.

"People will try crazy things, and we're especially concerned with this because it's not just drinking alcohol or trying to take drugs to fix something; it's literally ingesting a lethal ingestion that almost every emergency room physician has seen destroy a human body," said Kathuria.

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Dr. Kathuria said even exposing your skin to disinfectants can be damaging.

'For example if bleach just touches your eye, it can necrose and destroy your eye from the outside in and cause you to have permanent vision loss. That's just a tiny bit of bleach touching your eye. Imagine if you ingest that or inject it into your skin. It will destroy the cell membrane of your cells," said Kathuria.

Click here for more information from the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

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