Summary

Over the past year I’ve investigated potential interventions against respiratory illnesses. Previous results include “Enovid nasal spray is promising but understudied”, “Povidone iodine is promising but understudied” and “Humming will solve all your problems no wait it's useless”. Two of the iodine papers showed salt water doing as well or almost as well as iodine. I assume salt water has lower side effects, so that seemed like a promising thing to check. I still believe that, but that's about all I believe, because papers studying gargling salt water (without nasal irrigation) are few and far between.

I ended up finding only one new paper I thought valuable that wasn’t already included in my original review of iodine, and it focused on tap water, not salt water. It found a 30% drop in illness when gargling increased in frequency from 1 time per day to 3.6 [...]

---

Outline:

(00:04) Summary

(01:20) Papers

(01:23) Estimating salivary carriage of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in nonsymptomatic people and efficacy of mouthrinse in reducing viral load: A randomized controlled trial

(03:33) The short-term effect of different chlorhexidine forms versus povidone iodine mouth rinse in minimizing the oral SARS-CoV-2 viral load: An open label randomized controlled clinical trial study

(05:38) Prevention of upper respiratory tract infections by gargling: a randomized trial

(09:28) Dishonorable Mention: Vitamin D3 and gargling for the prevention of upper respiratory tract infections: a randomized controlled trial

(10:10) Conclusion

The original text contained 4 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:
November 22nd, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ze9fXSzG88v3pE6Zk/salt-water-gargling-as-an-antiviral

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“(Salt) Water Gargling as an Antiviral” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)