In more news you can use before Christmas, here’s another cheap easy way to put the brakes on Covid is with the antiseptic Povidone Iodine.

While Carrageenan can clog up the virus in the passages behind your nose, it doesn’t necessarily do much to stop the virus replicating in your mouth and throat. But a regular swish or a sniff with Povidone-iodine can reduce the viral load to nothing in a matter of 15 to 30 seconds. Note, you’re supposed to spit it out again, not drink it and make sure to use a very dilute solution.

Saliva can contain as many as 100 million infectious copies of Covid per ml, so the aim here is to reduce the number drastically every four hours. It’ll stop you infecting people around you, and probably help buy you time to fight back against the virus.

Between February and August last year Choudhury et al enrolled 600 people in Bangladesh. Half were asked to use a 1% povidone iodine solution to gargle, use in nasal drops and eye drops. They were asked to do this every 4 hours for 4 weeks, which sounds like a chore, but is nicer than going to hospital. The other half did the same thing but only with lukewarm water. Since nasal rinsing is sometimes claimed to be useful, even the placebo arm may have got some benefit. But the difference was still impressive.

Only 3.3% of the group that used Povidone-Iodine ended up in hospital, while nearly 21% of the plain “water washers” did. Only 2 people died in the treatment group, but 17 people did in the control group.

Randomised controlled trials are useful, but brutal. Perhaps 15 people might not be dead now if they had been randomly assigned to the other group.

The bottom row is the total male plus female.

This is good for everyone except Pharmaceutical companies selling vaccines and treatments.

Chopra et al reviews the situation from a dentists point of view. Dentists are at high risk of catching covid, especially for some procedures, so Dental associations are keen to give patients a mouthwash and rinse before treatment so people don’t infect their dentist.

Chopra tested Four products of PVP-I for a contact time of 30 s for virucidal activity

a. Antiseptic solution (PVP-I 10%)
b. Skin cleanser (PVP-I 7.5%)
c. Gargle and mouth wash (PVP-I 1%)
d. Throat spray (PVP-I 0.45%)

and concluded: “All products of PVP-I inactivated the virus by ≥99.99% which corresponded to ≥4log₁₀ reduction of virus titre, within 30 s of contact”

So even the half a percent solution still killed 9,999 viruses out of 10,000 and with only 30 seconds of swishing.

Again, the aim is to whack the viral replication in the early days, and thwart the virus. An antiseptic won’t kill every germ — especially not the ones hiding inside your cells, but it will buy your B and T cells time to figure out the best plan of attack, and stop you infecting everyone around you. If only the vaccines worked this well?

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