Wuflu Precautions #2

Liquid preps? Sweet!

So the Wuflu is in your area. Seriously, it is. But let’s say it’s a little closer to home than Travis AFB, and there are diagnosed cases within 25 miles. Let’s say that news showed up while you were at work and you didn’t hear about it until after stopping by the grocery store and having a lot of hacking, snorting people around you.

Yikes. Have you been exposed? No way of knowing. It is the cold and flu season, after all, and hacking, snorting people are a part of the landscape, even though they ought to be staying home. Maybe they don’t have anyone to go to the store for them. But you’ve been shopping in a miasma of aerosolized droplets of {something}. What do you do?

A good hot shower with plenty of soap won’t hurt. It won’t kill the bugs, but it does make it easier to wash them off, and anything you can do to reduce your bacterial/viral load is a Good Thing. With most infections, it takes tens or hundreds of thousands of bugs to get a healthy individual sick. If you can get those bugs off of you and down a drain, it’s going to be a plus.

But wait-doesn’t this stuff get in you through your mucous membranes? Yes, that is the primary entrance the bugs have into your body. Don’t panic because you can’t wash your eyeballs. On SurvivalBlog there is an article on “Post-Exposure Prevention (PEP) Protocol“. The short version of this is diluting the standard 10% povidone iodine solution you can buy at your local drug store down to a 1% solution and using it as a gargle and eyewash. I’ve looked around and I’ve found these articles which seem to support the ophthalmic (eye) and oral use of povidone-iodine:

• Povidone-iodine Safe Use of a Common Antiseptic (from the poison control folks)
• povidone-iodine (Wikipedia, with some interesting stuff on sterile vs. non-sterile solutions)
• povidone iodine – Drug Summary (Physicians’ Digital Reference, not the same folks as the Physician’s Desk Reference)
• Povidone-Iodine (ScienceDirect)

As always with this sort of thing, I’m not a medical professional, I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night and this ain’t medical advice. DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK!

More to come.