Whether misuse the oral hygiene may facilitate the speared of Covid 19 among cohabiting individual?

Abstract

Background Despite all the existing guidelines regarding Covid-19, there has been less emphasis on oral care to reduce the amount of virus in the mouth and saliva and thus reduce the risk of transmission of this disease. The purpose of this study is to investigate oral hygiene habits and infection control behaviors and their relationship with the rate of family transmission in patients with covid-19. Methods In this cross-sectional analytical study, 179 patients with covid-19 referred to the Razi Medical Training Center in Rasht were examined in the form of continuous sampling in 1400–1401. The data collection tool is a 3-part questionnaire including 1) personal social and clinical information of a person infected with Covid-19, basic information from family members in contact with the infected person, and transfer to another person in the family 2) oral hygiene habits during quarantine 3) infection control behaviors. To analyze the collected data, independent t-tests, ANOVA, and Spearman's correlation were used for quantitative variables, and the Chi-square test was used for qualitative variables in SPSS software version 28, and the level of significance in all tests was 0.05. Results The findings showed that the rate of family transmission of the disease was 61.5%. There was no significant relationship between oral hygiene habits with the family transmission of Covid-19 (p = 0.108), but the use of a shared toothbrush container and a shared toothpaste tube among family members was significantly related to the rate of family transmission (p = 0.042 and p > 0.001, respectively) Conclusions There was no relationship between oral hygiene habits and the transmission of covid-19 disease in family members, but oral hygiene habits were effective in contracting a more severe form of the disease and the rate of hospitalization. The use of toothbrush containers and toothpaste tubes shared between family members increased the chance of family transmission of covid-19.