well the horse has ran it's course, went off track collapsed got picked up then beaten to death
so I'll beat it yet some more before the carcass is cremation
The most effective way to reduce the overall risk of oral STD/STI transmission is screening, treatment, and using barriers for oral sex.
However, recent studies have also begun to suggest that using antiseptic mouthwash,
such as Listerine, may also be able to reduce the risk of some oral STD transmission
The manufacturers of Listerine have been claiming (even if it took 137 years to get it) that the mouthwash
(it was never intended as a mouthwash! Listerine was invented in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic.
Soon afterward it was sold as a floor cleaner and a cure for everything from chapped hands to gonorrhoea
.)
can cure gonorrhoea, a common sexually transmitted infection that has been increasing
To test the claims about Listerine, scientists first used Listerine Cool Mint and Listerine Total Care, both 21.6% alcohol,
in petri dishes with a colony of gonorrhoea bacteria. They diluted the Listerine at different levels, from a 1:2 dilution to a 1:32 dilution,
and compared its ability to kill the bacteria to saline. At dilutions of 1:2 and 1:4, the Listerine successfully wiped out the gonorrhoea, unlike the saline.
Then, the researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial with 196 men who have sex with men.
All the men received a standard treatment of antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin,
but 104 of them also gargled for one minute as far back in their throats as they could with 20 mL of Listerine Cool Mint.
The other 92 gargled with saline.
Five minutes later, the scientists swabbed the men’s tonsils and the backs of their throats.
Ultimately, only 58 of the men tested positive for gonorrhoea in throat and tonsil swabs before gargling,
so only these men’s results were analysed: 33 who gargled with Listerine and 25 who gargled with saline.
Of these post-gargling swabs, 84% of the men who gargled with saline had a positive result for gonorrhoea,
but just 52% of the men who gargled with Listerine did. So half the men who gargled with Listerine for one minute
no longer had detectable quantities of gonorrhoea bacteria in their mouths.
This is good news, but several major caveats should be immediately noted:
First, the study is very small. Second, the men were tested only 5 minutes after one minute of gargling,
and the researchers did not test longer-term effects of Listerine on mouth bacteria.
For all we know, the bacteria could have returned a day later, or an hour later or 10 minutes later.
Third, half the men who gargled with Listerine still tested positive for having detectable levels of gonorrhoea bacteria in their mouths,
so the short-term effect is only half effective based on this small group. Fourth, the study in no way suggests that Listerine can “cure” gonorrhoea.
Only prescribed antibiotics have been shown to treat the infection.
Fifth, the intervention only addresses oral gonorrhoea—no one is testing or suggesting using mouthwash in the genital area.
That may not work out too well
yet, the findings, especially if confirmed in larger studies, do suggest that gargling with Listerine can reduce the risk of oral transmission of the STI,
and that’s no small thing.
“If daily use of mouthwash was shown to reduce the duration of untreated infection and/or reduce the probability of acquisition of N. gonorrhoeae
then this readily available, condom less and low-cost intervention may have very significant public health implications in the control of gonorrhoea
the researchers wrote. “Interventions such as this are urgently needed in the context of rising rates of gonorrhoea in men who have sex with men
and the likelihood that condom use may fall further as condom-free HIV preventions are more widely adopted.”
it's recommend that future studies look at long-term effects and long-term use of Listerine, such as daily use over months.
This study, then, was more of a proof-of-concept study that provides the evidence needed to justify additional larger, longer,
more expensive and more involved studies.
The longer lasting effects of Listerine in the petri dish experiment suggest the same may be possible in people
“In addition, if the load of N. gonorrhoeae was reduced by the mouthwash after a single dose then one might expect that daily mouthwash
over weeks would potentially reduce the viable number of N. gonorrhoeae, and hence reduce further transmission or reduce the mean duration of infection,”.
researchers don’t know if it’s the alcohol content or another ingredient or combination of ingredients in Listerine that killed the bacteria.
Therefore, gargling with, say, a shot of vodka before fellatio may not necessarily have any protective effect
