According to the National Health Institute, influenza hospitalizes 200,000 people each year, along with killing more than 36,000 people in the United States annually. This is why the Center for Disease Control recommends taking a flu vaccine each year to help prevent infection or curb the dangers of infection of the flu virus. However, scientists have found a way that’s 95% effective at preventing the spread of the flu: chewing gum.
Not just any chewing gum, mind you. The researchers and dentists over at the University of Pennsylvania with some collaborators in Finland have developed a special gum that neutralizes not just flu viral loads in human mouths, but can also prevent the spread of oral herpes simplex. This is considered a huge breakthrough in that seasonal influenza epidemics cause economic losses exceeding $11.2 billion each year in just the United States alone. On top of that, over two-thirds of the global population is infected with HSV-1 (herpes) as it is highly contagious.
Henry Daniell and his team at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Dental Medicine created the chewing gum with an Australian pea plant Lablab purpureus. This plant naturally contains an antiviral trap protein called FRIL that can neutralize certain viral loads that are present in our mouths and saliva when we are infected. Daniell had been working on a gum to prevent viral spread of diseases since the COVID-19 pandemic, with the reasoning that most people catch viral disease through oral contact of some kind rather than from the nasal cavity.
After testing alongside their Finnish colleagues, the researchers found that 40 milligrams of the pea plant bean powder within a two-gram gum tablet could reduce the spread of viral loads of two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2) by 95%. This means that if you are infected with these virus strains, chewing this gum has a 95% chance of preventing you from infecting someone else that you are talking to, coughing around, or just plain breathing around. Daniell is also working on another gum for humans and a possible feed for birds that contain the bean powder to curb the spread of bird flu.
You cannot be too careful when trying to prevent the spread of the flu.Photo credit: Canva
“Controlling transmission of viruses continues to be major global challenge. A broad spectrum antiviral protein (FRIL) present in a natural food product (bean powder) to neutralize not only human flu viruses but also avian (bird) flu is a timely innovation to prevent their infection and transmission,” Daniell told Penn News.
While this gum isn’t on the market yet, there are ways to help significantly prevent the spread of flu during the peak seasons of infection. Some of these may be common sense, but a review is never a bad thing. If you or someone in your house has the flu, be sure to regularly wash your hands with hot water to kill germs before you handle anything. Cough or sneeze into a tissue or in the crook of your elbow to prevent droplets of saliva and mucus from hitting other people or objects. Do your best to limit contact with other people face-to-face and wear a mask if you do.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Lastly, until this gum is further proven effective and placed into the market, the best way to prevent the spread is to make it harder for the virus to infect you in the first place. The best way to do that is to get an annual flu vaccination at your local pharmacy or physician’s office. Contacting your doctor or pharmacist can help direct you to the best option near you.
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.