Washington, Sept 10: A new spray, known as Halo Oral Antiseptic, effectively kills 99.9 per cent of infectious airborne bugs that cause respiratory illnesses, including flu and colds.
"Respiratory tract disease is a major cause of morbidity (diseased state) and mortality throughout the world," says Frank Esper, infectious disease expert at University Hospitals' (UH) Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in the US, who led one of the studies for testing effectiveness of the spray.
"Yet there has been limited progress in the prevention of respiratory virus infections. Halo is unique in that it offers protection from airborne germs such as influenza (flu) and rhinovirus," adds Esper, according to an UH statement.
Esper and his team used glycerine and xanthan gum as a microbial barrier combined with cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) as an anti-infective agent to fight respiratory illnesses, including cold and flu.
Clinical strains of 2009 pandemic H1N1 were used as a prototype virus to demonstrate Halo's anti-infective activity in cell culture assays.
"The glycerine and xanthan gum prevent the germs from entering a person's system and the CPC kills the germs once they're trapped there," explains Esper, also associate professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Another study on Halo conducted by Mahmoud Ghannoum, from UH Case Medical Centre, showed Halo's effectiveness against disease-causing pathogenic germs.
The presentation asserts that respiratory and/or systemic infections through airborne and manually transmitted pathogenic microbes often enter the system through the mouth, making Halo, an oral spray that targets these pathogens, an effective way to prevent infections.
Besides, preliminary data from the researchers found that Halo completely kills all 11 clinical strains of whooping cough (Bordetella pertussis) against which the spray was tested.
The results showed that when a person used three sprays of Halo, it destroyed airborne germs breathed in for up to six hours, even when people were eating and drinking.
Both Esper and Ghannoum presented these findings in San Francisco at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC).
