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Review
. 2021 Mar;28(3):1519-1527.
doi: 10.1016/j.sjbs.2020.12.031. Epub 2020 Dec 22.

Fighting against the second wave of COVID-19: Can honeybee products help protect against the pandemic?

Yahya Al Naggar  1   2 , John P Giesy  3 , Mohamed M Abdel-Daim  4   5 , Mohammad Javed Ansari  6 , Saad N Al-Kahtani  7 , Galal Yahya  8   9
Affiliations
Review

Fighting against the second wave of COVID-19: Can honeybee products help protect against the pandemic?

Yahya Al Naggar et al. Saudi J Biol Sci. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has infected people in 210 nations and has been declared a pandemic on March 12, 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO). In the absence of effective treatment and/or vaccines for COVID-19, natural products of known therapeutic and antiviral activity could offer an inexpensive, effective option for managing the disease. Benefits of products of honey bees such as honey, propolis, and bee venom, against various types of diseases have been observed. Honey bees products are well known for their nutritional and medicinal values, they have been employed for ages for various therapeutic purposes. In this review, promising effects of various bee products against the emerging pandemic COVID-19 are discussed. Products of honey bees that contain mixtures of potentially active chemicals, possess unique properties that might help to protect, fight, and alleviate symptoms of COVID-19 infection.

Keywords: Alternative medicine; Antiviral effect; COVID-19; Honey; Natural products.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

None
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Host cell and SARS-CoV-2 viral envelope (E), membrane (M), nucleocapsid (N), and spike (S) proteins (Source; https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/technical-documents/protocols/biology/ncov-coronavirus-proteins.html).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Diagram indicating potential protective effects of honey against SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes Covid-19. SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted through tiny droplets released from an infected person to another person then the virus particles either pass to the lungs and progress as in A or trapped by honey then destroyed by the biocidal activity of honey or pass to the gastric acid of stomach as we propose in B.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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