s In Your Nose Can Kill

What this episode covers

Tap Water SprayVidcast:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DJ96O8gO8oN/Irrigating and cleansing your nasal linings with saline can resolve nasal congestion, help manage or even prevent nasal allergies, prevent nosebleeds, and hasten your resolution of the common cold.  To reap these benefits, you must use the proper water.  Making the all too common mistakes of using tap water and not properly cleansing the irrigation devices can lead to brain infections and death.Though tap water in most communities is filtered and purified to kill harmful germs and remove toxic impurities, some treacherous microorganisms like brain-eating amoebae and or molds, fungi, can slip through.  Stomach acid kills these bugs, but the nasal linings have no such protective device.  Worse still, when you spray tap water into your nose, openings in the roof of the nasal cavity provide ready access for these germs into your brain resulting in a life-threatening infection called encephalitis.The companies that market irrigators whether the simple Neti Pot or the more sophisticated motorized irrigators such as the Navage and the NasalFresh MD are careful to instruct their buyers, namely you, to only use distilled or boiled water to which you must add a package of salts in order to create, in essence, a sterile saline solution with proper acidity and salt levels.  Problem is that some don’t read or follow instructions.The CDC, FDA, and I recommend regular nasal irrigations.  The easiest and safest way to do this is to use sterile aerosol saline.  This type of product was pioneered by Arm and Hammer’s Simply Saline but is now available from numerous companies as NeilMed’s Nasal Wash, Sinex Ultrafine Nasal Mist, and SinuCleanse Sterile Saline Nasal Spray.While you can purchase sterile saline in pre-filled squeeze bottles, I caution against doing so and favor sealed aerosol canisters.  With the squeeze bottles, releasing the squeeze can suck nasal snot, definitely not sterile, into the bottle where bacteria and other germs are free to grow at room temperatures.  When you next spray the saline, these nasty organisms can easily find their way into your brain.https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/rinsing-your-sinuses-neti-pots-safe#saline #nasalspray #netipots #irrigators #infection #braineatingamoebae

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