Gargle medicine can fight virus, Osaka says citing limited data

[OSAKA] The Governor of Japan's Osaka prefecture touted the powers of gargling medicine to control the coronavirus and recommended its use, sending related shares jumping and clearing shelves of disinfectants even as some questioned the findings.

Based on limited trial on a group of 41 patients with mild symptoms, gargling with diluted povidone-iodine four times a day reduced the number of those testing positive to 9.5 per cent after four days, compared with 40 per cent for a group who gargled with just water, Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura said at a press briefing on Tuesday.

Povidone-iodine is an antiseptic more commonly known as betadine. In Japan, it's sold as gargles by Shionogi & Co, using the name Isojin under license from Mundipharma, as well as by Meiji Holdings Co. Meiji, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg News, saw its shares surging as much as 7.7 per cent in Tokyo following the news. Shionogi rose as much as 3.6 per cent.

"It's worth giving a try," Mr Yoshimura said, recommending the its use to residents with symptoms and those working in high-risk industries such as bars, restaurants and health-care. "It's a drug that everyone can buy at a drug store and it doesn't do any harm."

The finding isn't based on data from a large, randomized, controlled trial -- the gold standard for assessing the safety and efficacy of any potential therapy. When asked by a reporter if it was appropriate to be touting the medicine at such an early stage in its research, Osaka Mayor Ichiro Matsui, who was also speaking at the briefing, questioned back if he was supposed to ignore the findings.

"We've always been asking people to gargle, in addition to washing their hands, wearing a mask and social distancing," said Matsui. "Now we're just saying there were better results when they gargled with this instead of gargling with nothing."

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People in Japan commonly gargle as a preventative measure against colds and flus in winter, similar to hand-washing. While the country saw some initial success in containing the virus, cases have flared up across Japan, with infections in Osaka coming close to surpassing Tokyo.

The rush to find something to stem the spread of the pandemic has led to multiple treatments being hailed worldwide as a potential silver bullet for the disease before sufficient data can back those claims up, from hydroxychloroquine touted by President Donald Trump, to Fujifilm Holdings Corp.'s antiviral drug Avigan.

"I even think that gargling with povidone-iodine could defeat the coronavirus," Mr Yoshimura said. "But it's still in the research phase and we can't say anything definitive."

BLOOMBERG