Vishal Paul¹, Chandrashekharaiah PS¹, Rajesh Nandru², Shyam Prasad¹, Santosh Kodgire¹, Shivbachan Kushwaha¹*, Debanjan Sanyal¹ and Santanu Dasgupta²

¹Reliance Industries Ltd, Jamnagar, India

*Corresponding Author: Shivbachan Kushwaha, Research and Development, Reliance Industries Ltd, Gagva, Jamnagar, Gujarat, India.

Received: June 13, 2022; Published: July 07, 2022

Abstract

Disinfection is a primary means to control a spread of any disease caused by infectious microorganisms. The never seen before COVID-19 pandemic has created a havoc in public health. The COVID-19 virus which persists on human body parts and environment acts as a new source of infection. The personal and environmental sanitization along with other social measures needs to be practised to prevent the rapid spread of COVID-19. Disinfection of public places and open environment requires large quantity of disinfectants and due to this it remains a costly approach. Already, there have been a plenty of disinfectants available in the market which are mostly based on alcohols and phenols but have limited applications owing to their higher costs. Hence, there is a need for identification of bulk commodity chemicals which have biocidal properties. Urea is one of the commodity chemicals which has biocidal property due to its protein and RNA denaturation ability. In most of the literature it has been mentioned that 7-8% urea is safe to use on human skin and found effective against many enveloped and non-enveloped viruses. Also, at 50-60 °C temperature and pH 3-9, urea was found stable for more than 2 months. Because of all these properties it can be a potential low-cost disinfectant for COVID-19 control. In this review, a systematic study was done to assess the antiviral, stability, and compatibility properties of urea to use as an ideal surface or personal care disinfectant agent for control of COVID-19.

Keywords:Antiviral; COVID-19; Disinfectant; Protein Denaturant; Urea

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Citation

Citation: Shivbachan Kushwaha., et al. “Urea: A Low-cost Disinfectant for Prolonged Activity in Combating Spread of COVID-19". Acta Scientific Microbiology 5.8 (2022): 05-13.

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Copyright: © 2022 Shivbachan Kushwaha., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.