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For five years, Covid has been the scourge that brought the world to a grinding halt. The virus wreaked havoc on entire nations and forced us into months on end of lockdowns and facial masks. It took a year before the vaccine was introduced that gave people hope that Covid could be beaten. A new study, however, now suggests that a common ingredient in many nasal sprays may hold the key to slowing down or possibly even preventing altogether the transmission of the Covid virus. Dr. Gregory Poland is the leader of vaccines and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic; he made a house call with 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to tell us if a path to prevention has literally been under our noses all this time.
“This is really interesting,” Dr. Poland told host Larry Mendte. “It’s an antihistamine that’s used in a lot of nasal sprays, called azelastine, and somebody had the idea to do a study with it and, lo and behold, what did they show? They showed it decreased by 70% in PCR-confirmed Covid infection, a decrease in the number of symptomatic days, and a different virus called rhinovirus… Now, the kicker on this is we don’t really know the mechanism, and in this study, people had to use the nasal spray three times a day for almost 60 days.”
Before you run to the pharmacy and start randomly spritzing stuff in your schnozz, Dr. Poland cautions there were side effects: “People get dryness, they can get cracking of the mucosa and around the nose, they can get burning, stinging, headaches, so it’s like anything; there’s always side effects to something we use. It’s the balance of benefit and risk that we look for.”
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