Mouthwash and Covid?

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Anchor lead: Could using mouthwash help prevent Covid-19? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Using mouthwash may help reduce the number of Sars-CoV2 viruses in the mouth and throat and may therefore reduce infections. That’s at least the hypothesis being tested by one mouthwash manufacturer. Andrew Lane, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Lane: The gist of that one was that you might be able to kill virus with mouthwash. It’s the same idea we talk about for the nose. We know that on surfaces you can disrupt the virus with soaps and with Betadine and those kinds of things. Whether or not it makes sense to put it in your body or in your nose or in your mouth it needs to be researched. I’m thinking that all those things the virus is fairly fragile, many things can disrupt it. It’s just really in practical terms how much of the viral load are you removing and is this really going to change the course of the virus.  :29

Lane says he’s had many many patients ask him whether they should use mouthwash to help reduce their risk for Covid-19, and he’s largely adopted an ‘unlikely to cause harm,’ approach. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.