Inhaling a salt-water aerosol, a treatment often used for asthma, may also reduce the spread of germs that can spread disease, according to a new report. People suffering from a variety of illnesses exhale bacteria and viruses which can spread disease to others. A small study involving 11 people found that about half of them exhaled much larger amounts of germs than the others. For those people the salt-water treatment reduced the viruses or bacteria being exhaled for six hours. The study is reported in this week’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
