Popular bed company, Mouka in collaboration with the Nigeria Society of Physiotherapy (NSP), has begged Nigerians to not tamper with their quality sleep as it helps to boost the immune system against diseases.

The Vice President of the NSP, Dr. Nnenna Nina Chigbo recently came out to say that a healthy immune system that can be derived from quality sleep on comfortable mattresses is needed to battle deadly sicknesses, including coronavirus.

According to her, documented evidence shows that certain cells that help fight infections in the body increase significantly during sleep, which results in the proper functioning of the body, including immune function, tissue healing, pain modulation, cardiovascular health, cognitive function, learning, and memory.

She added that with quality sleep, hormones that help our body are better regulated.

Her words, “During quality sleep, hormones that help our body are better regulated. On the other hand, lack of sleep can cause long term issues such as a lower immunity and it can increase the risk of conditions such as diabetes, heart and cardiovascular issues and obesity. These complications increase your risk of contracting viral diseases like the COVID-19.”

“A good quality mattress determines a great deal how well you will sleep. The body needs to align well with the mattress – not too soft and not too hard. A bad mattress can affect the spine and cause damage to the body, the quality of sleep and can be detrimental to physical, mental health and overall quality of life.”

What do you think?

Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.