Now this is potentially very interesting, and if it holds up could be hugely important.

Last week scientists at University of Birmingham reported developing a nasal spray which could provide protection against Covid-19 – although the work has not yet been peer-reviewed and published in the scientific literature.

Yes, OK, you may say; so what? Well the interesting – and potentially important – part is that it is based on two naturally occurring polysaccharide (polymerised sugar) gelling agents, carrageenan (E407/E407a) and gellan (E418), which already have worldwide approval for use in the food industry – so they’re already safety tested and widely available. This means, if the results hold up in vivo, a nasal spray could be developed and manufactured quite quickly and presumably cheaply.

The other interesting part is that the nasal spray uses the gelling properties of the two agents to encapsulate the virus particles (thus neutralising them), rather than any form of biochemical/medical destruction.

The spray could be especially useful in situations where it is difficult to provide normal “barrier” methods to inhibit transmission – although it is unlikely to be a replacement for such measures.

It seems to me the importance goes even wider than this. Surely such a method should be useable as a protective against many other air-borne viruses (like colds and flu) and possibly even bacteria.

This seems so simple, one has to wonder why we’ve never thought of it before!