United States: According to recent research, swabbing your nose with a fingerful of Neosporin antibiotic may help stave off a variety of invasive respiratory infections.
Researchers and some experts have discovered that lab mice whose nostrils were treated with neomycin, the active component of over-the-counter Neosporin ointment, had a robust immune response against the COVID virus and a highly pathogenic strain of influenza.
The most important part is that the same nasal approach seems to work in humans as well, this time with Neosporin itself. As researchers have reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which states that this ointment triggered has a very swift immune response that and comes from the genes in the human nose, which serve as a first line of defense against all invading viruses and bacteria.
“This is an exciting finding that a cheap over-the-counter antibiotic ointment can stimulate the human body to activate an antiviral response,” said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology and dermatology at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
According to the U.S. National Institutes of Medicine, Neosporin which is also known as triple antibiotic ointment, contains neomycin, bacitracin, and polymyxin B, although the COVID-19 virus has infected more than 774 million people, and nearly 7 million have been killed, researchers said in the background notes on top of that flu viruses can cause up to 5 million cases of severe disease and a half million deaths in a year.
Against these threats, humans deploy treatments that are literally taken orally or intravenously. These approaches focus on stopping the progression of infections, and according to the researchers, this nasal-centered therapy has a much better tendency to prevent infections before they damage the lungs and can cause life-threatening illnesses like pneumonia.
Researchers began studying mice and discovered that nasal neomycin induced a strong immune response in those infected with COVID-19 and influenza viruses and also found that neomycin effectively protected lab hamsters against COVID-19 transmission by touch. When Neosporin was swabbed into the noses of some healthy people, a robust immune response was also observed.
“Our findings suggest that we might be able to optimize this cheap and generic antibiotic to prevent viral diseases and their spread in human populations, especially in global communities with limited resources,” Iwasaki said in a Yale news release. “This approach, because it is host-directed, should work no matter what the virus is.”