by ANNA CIAUNICA

Contemplating the world requires a body, and a body requires an immune system: the rungs of life create the stuff of thought

One can easily imagine Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1904) tortured by deep philosophical questions such as ‘Who am I? What is the meaning of all this, what is life? Why am I here, given that I haven’t signed a consent form to be alive here and now, so what’s this all about, really?’

I too was tortured by these deep questions as a young student in philosophy, and used to ponder them standing in front of a cast of Rodin’s statue in the grounds of the Hôtel Biron in Paris. I guess I was looking for something, the meaning of all this. Since then, and after drinking so much coffee that I could flood a city with it, I still haven’t got an answer. And yet, one day, something happened: a breakthrough, or perhaps an epiphany.

A couple of years ago, I went back to The Thinker as I had so many times when younger: he was still there, still thinking, holding his head as if all those deep, heavy thoughts had transformed his skull to stone.

While searching for the right angle to take a selfie, a miracle happened: I got hungry. Partly because of the heat, partly because I’d had just one black coffee in the morning, the head of Rodin’s Thinker started tilting and melting, and the massive weight of his body became visible to my mind. It was as if the statue was slowly liquefying and transforming into a vegetal living thing, something like a salad, or perhaps a cucumber? Something fresh anyway, something that I could have eaten on the spot. And then some questions popped into my head: did the Thinker like cucumber salad? Where did he grow up? Did he prefer summer or winter? White wine or red? Where was he from?

And in that moment I realised I had got it all wrong. I was so obsessed with his thinking brain that I had ignored his toes – not to mention the rest of him.

Aeon for more

by JASON HICKEL

A crucial strategy for transformation in the 21st century.

The concept of delinking has gained traction recently among some political movements in the global South, including with an international conference in Mexico on this topic that took place last month.

What is delinking, and how can it be achieved?

Delinking was best described by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin. He started from the observation that the capitalist world economy is characterised by a stark division of labour between the imperial core (often glossed as the global North) and the periphery (the global South).

In this system, the core states seek to monopolise the most profitable forms of production and establish control over global commodity chains, while preventing sovereign development in the periphery to maintain it as a subordinate supplier of cheap labour. Southern labour and resources are roped into producing things like sweatshop goods and plantation commodities for the core, at compressed market prices, rather than producing for local human needs and national development.

Amin pointed out that this system is characterised by large core-periphery price disparities and therefore unequal exchange in international trade. The South is made dependent on imports of technologies and producer goods from the core at monopoly prices, and to pay for this they have to export massive quantities of artificially cheapened commodities and manufactured goods, thus generating a net-transfer of value from the periphery to the core. This enriches the core but drains the periphery of resources necessary for development.

This system produces and perpetuates poverty and underdevelopment in the South. There is nothing inevitable about poverty; it is an effect of imperialist dynamics in the world economy. The global South has extraordinary productive capacities; massive labour power, land, factories and resources. The problem is they do not have sovereign control over production.

To address this problem, Amin called for a process of delinking, which for him contains two key elements:

1) Delink from exploitation by the imperial core. Southern states should end dependence on imports from the core, and end dependence on imperial capital and core currencies, in order to build economic sovereignty and mitigate unequal exchange. Note that Amin was not calling for autarky or isolation; on the contrary, he actively encouraged South-South cooperation and trade as a tactic for overcoming imperial dependencies.

2) Delink from the capitalist law of value. Under capitalism, production is organised around whatever is most profitable to capital (largely, foreign capital). In the South, capital prefers to exploit cheap labour in global supply chains than to invest in technological innovation and industrial upgrading. This inhibits development. Southern governments must overcome this and align production to a new law of value: human needs and national development.

How can delinking be achieved in the 21^st century? Some basic principles include the following:

A first step is to reduce imports from the core. This can be achieved by reducing unnecessary imports (luxury goods, etc), while substituting necessary imports where possible with domestic production, or through South-South trade, ideally using swap lines to trade goods outside the US dollar or Euro. Taking this step reduces pressure for exports to the core (and reduces the need for core currencies), and therefore reduces exposure to unequal exchange.

Z Network for more

by MICHELLE STARR

Dust from the far side of the Moon has yielded an unexpected microscopic treasure we’ve never seen before.

A close examination of lunar material collected during the China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-6 mission revealed specks of dust from a kind of water-bearing meteorite so fragile it seldom survives the trip through Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s the first confirmed debris of a type of meteorite known as Ivuna-type carbonaceous chondrite – or CI chondrite – ever to be found on the Moon, demonstrating that fragile, water-bearing asteroids can leave microscopic traces embedded in the lunar regolith.

CI chondrites are the most water- and volatile-rich of meteorites, with compositions similar to space rocks like Ryugu and Bennu. They are very porous and ‘wet’, with up to 20 percent of their weight bound up in water as hydrated minerals.

Because of this, they’re also unusually soft and crumbly compared to other space rocks, which means they’re particularly susceptible to destruction on atmospheric entry and impact. This means that fewer than one percent of meteorites found on Earth are CI chondrites. They are extremely rare.

They’re not expected to survive on the Moon, either; although the Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere in which meteorites can burn and explode, the velocity with which objects collide with the lunar surface is so high that material is expected to either vaporize, melt, or be flung back into space.

Led by geochemists Jintuan Wang and Zhiming Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers sifted through more than 5,000 fragments of Chang’e-6 material in the hope of finding impact material, even if it had been altered.

The sample was collected from a crater-within-a-crater – the Apollo Basin inside the vast South Pole-Aitken Basin, which covers nearly a quarter of the lunar surface. That made it a prime site for ancient impact debris.

The researchers focused on olivine, a magnesium-iron silicate mineral commonly found in volcanic rock, impact melts, and meteorites. They isolated several olivine-bearing fragments – or clasts – mounting and polishing them to perform scanning electron microscopy, electron probe microanalysis, and secondary ion mass spectrometry.

Science Alert for more

by AJAMU BARAKA

By approving a U.S. “peace plan” that legitimizes genocide and ends the right to resist, the United Nations Security Council has not just failed Palestine—it has actively consolidated a new era of global fascism.

A Day That Will Live in Infamy 

A few days into the massive revenge attack by Israel on the Palestinian population in Gaza after the October 7th military action of the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, the Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned that the Israeli-led and U.S.-supported genocidal attack on Gaza represented the global rise of fascism. “Gaza,” he alerted, “is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable” and in bringing in a “might-makes-right era.”  

Two years later, the morally obscene and legally dubious vote by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on November 18 approved the Trump Administration’s pseudo-peace plan that effectively transfers the administration and occupation responsibilities of colonized and occupied Palestine to the U.S. and Israel, can only be understood as a corruption of the United Nations Charter and the concrete manifestation of the successful consolidation of U.S. led fascist power internationally.

On a vote of thirteen in favor with two abstentions from China and Russia, the UNSC continued the fiction that the so-called Trump peace plan advanced by the U.S., a nation that at minimum is guilty of complicity with genocide, represented a serious and credible attempt to bring about a resolution of the Palestinian national question.   

 In reality, however, the UNSC resolution firmly places the UN on the side of the Israeli/U.S. colonial project, violating all preceding resolutions, actions and legal interpretations that delegitimized colonialism in general but also specifically supported the legitimate right of Palestinians to resist colonization, including with arms.   

The right to engage in anti-colonial struggle and for national self-determination are theoretically prescribed rights under international law, and various United Nations resolutions from both the General Assembly and the Security Council. Those rights are not negotiable and cannot be redefined or surrendered as a result of a vote by the UNSC. Yet, that is precisely what happened.

The plan requires that Palestinians in Gaza surrender their right to resist colonial domination and self-determination. Objectively, it amounts to a declaration of war on Palestinian nationhood and a physical war against the Palestinian resistance. But even more ominously for the peoples of the global South, the resolution legitimizes and normalizes genocide as an acceptable response to anti-colonial resistance.

According to this “peace plan,” two million Palestinians are supposed to submit to living in concentration camps on less than half the land mass they were originally confined to in Gaza before the Israeli attack. Moreover, they are also supposed to submit to the indignity of a foreign-imposed occupation force with the Orwellian nomenclature of an “International Stabilization Force” under the joint domination of the white supremacist U.S. and Israel settler-colonial states.

Compounding the moral and legal outrageousness of this “peace plan” is the fact that it was advanced by the U.S., which is clearly complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Despite the claim by the U.S. president that his plan is supposed to bring peace and eventually a Palestinian state, the reality is that the intercession of the UNSC resolution legitimizing the UN’s alignment with the continuation of the oppression and colonial occupation of Palestine and its people, only re-normalized colonial genocidal practices. These same practices created all the white supremacist settler states and the European colonial projects in general.

The historical analogy of this vote would be if the UNSC had come down on the side of the white colonialist Afrikaners in South Africa, legitimized an interventionist force to suppress the Africans, and conferred a colonial mandate to rule over the colonized African indigenous majority.

So, is it really hyperbole to argue that the US-Israeli plan has nullified the Genocide Convention, the Apartheid Convention, the Geneva Conventions, opinions of the International Court of Justice and all the UN resolutions on Palestine? I don’t think so.

BAR for more

by RUNE MOLLER STAHL

Around Europe, old labor parties have alienated their base by forming grand coalitions with center-right forces. In Denmark, Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats have pursued this same strategy with the same dismal results.

Copenhagen saw a historic shift last Tuesday night, following the elections held in the Danish capital and across Denmark. After more than a century of holding power in Copenhagen, the Social Democrats finally lost the mayoralty.

Sisse Marie Welling, from the left-wing Socialist People’s Party (SF) instead claimed the lord mayor’s post within a broad coalition dominated by left-wingers. While the more moderate socialists in SF claimed the top job, the radical left Red-Green Alliance under leader Line Barfod emerged as the largest party with 22.1 percent of the vote. Together, the two socialist parties, supported by a smaller green party, almost secured an outright majority.

Following the election, these left-wing forces managed to create a coalition that did without virtually every other party in city hall. The Social Democrats were excluded even from a role in negotiations. This also saw the once-dominant party stripped of powerful board posts in important municipally led construction and public transport companies, historically central to the development of the city’s infrastructure.

The defeat came after an extremely negative — by Danish standards — campaign attacking the Red-Greens’ Barfod for her background in communist youth politics and denouncing the alliance’s Marxist foundations as a “corrosive, antidemocratic ideology.” Such accusations were remarkable coming from the Social Democrats, a party historically founded on Marxist principles.

This loss is both a substantial and symbolic shift. Copenhagen has been the center of the Danish labor movement since its rise in the 1870s. While other Scandinavian capitals like Oslo and Stockholm have moved rightward politically, Copenhagen has remained a historic bastion of left-wing politics.

Jacobin for more

by HAKKI OCAL

As the U.S. administration remains bound by Israel, Netanyahu drives the country into further extremism

The Atlantic magazine wonders if U.S. President Donald Trump could contain Israel’s hard right because Israel’s extremists, who keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm of Israel, seem not to be giving up on their ethnic cleansing policy. The Foreign Policy magazine asserts that only Trump could save Israel from its own government, but its editors suspect that even Trump could not stop history from repeating itself in Gaza because the Israeli army keeps planning for many more months of conflict to come, to kill and displace many more Palestinian civilians and to aggravate an already intolerable humanitarian situation.

Trump already began talking smut and using foul language when asked if Netanyahu violates his peace plan. While almost the entire foreign policy and international security team at the White House was in Tel Aviv, as if laughing in their faces, Netanyahu had the Knesset pass a law enabling the government to annex the West Bank. Knesset members also voiced the idea that Gaza City should be “West Shariazed” when the U.S. team was trying to make sure that Trump’s peace plan would not be violated.

Meaning of ‘West-Shariazed’

What is to be “West Shariazed” in the Zionists’ parlance? One of the three major regions of the Arab Partition of Palestine was named the “West Bank” (of the River Jordan or Nahr Al-Sharieat in Arabic) after the Zionists colonized Palestine. Through the policy to occupy, dispossess and settle in the Arab villages, towns, and even cities, or, as Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and a leading scientist among Israel’s new historians, calls it, the “urbicide of Palestine,” the Zionist colonialism nearly emptied the Arab partitions of the Arab population.

After the 1967 War, Israel annexed the northern-most Nazareth (Acre) section and implemented a military occupation regime in the middle (West Bank) and the south (Gaza City) sections. The Gaza Strip was under Israeli Military Administration from 1967 to 1994. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disengaged the Israeli military from Gaza in 2004 and the actual unilateral dismantlement of the Zionist settlements occurred in 2005. However, the decision to disengage from Gaza was largely opposed by the Israeli hard right; they supported Netanyahu’s government with a six-vote majority in the Knesset in exchange for the promise to reoccupy Gaza and allow resettlement. Meanwhile, occupation, settlements and occasional annexation continued in the West Bank.

Now, Netanyahu’s accomplices in war crimes and genocide in Gaza, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, pushed the annexation of the West Bank and called for the same military regime to be implemented in Gaza after the dissolution of Hamas: hence, “West-Shariazing Gaza.”

U.S. officials should wake up

Meanwhile, a “senior American official” said that if Netanyahu screws up the Gaza deal, Trump will screw him! However, using foul language is not going to work on Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir or Smotrich. Neither would issuing “stark warnings” to Netanyahu if he allows the cease-fire to collapse!

Daily Sabah for more

by EVANS MUCHUI

Hustlerfund, a mobile lending application in Kenya advances a 20-year-old woman named Khamba to stock up her fruit stall in Nakura. In another seven days, it has almost doubled. In a case where she is a day and a day late in paying, the platform starts sending messages to her entire contact list labelling her as a thief. Lagos, a young man, is a ride-hailing driver who borrows a N15,000 loan to fix his bike. He makes it back punctually over a period of months, but his credit limit does not change much. Rather, his information is repackaged on other portals, and he is profiled as owing more money.

These tales exist across the whole continent. They are the symptoms of a system that becomes similar to financial extraction, which is disguised by the language of inclusion. The African digital lending boom is frequently celebrated as an innovation, but in reality it may run just like a new colonial infrastructure, and it is not carried out using force but rather through algorithms, information capture, and pressure to repay debts.

From Taxation To Digital Dependence

Earlier colonialist governments would impose labour with a corrective form of tax regime. The digital lenders do not usurp the land and labour, they take away personal data, patterns of behaviour and future income today. The instant credit, short repayment cycles and obscurant pricing are helping to push borrowers toward a state of dependency. What is a form of access soon turns into a trap.

Access to credit is not the adversary. Mobile lending is the sole financial lifeline to millions of Africans, small entrepreneurs and gig workers as well as continual traders. What is at question and the way that access is organized. Thousands of platforms work within the cycles of high frequency borrowing, undisclosed fees rather than the open interest rates, and practical annual rates of up to 100 percent to half a million. It can even cause automatic harassment to people other than the borrower when default occurs, such as friends, employers and family. These are not financial instruments. They are pressure systems.

A Pan-African Pattern

Powerful credit ecosystems were established on early products in Kenya such as M-Shwari, Tala and Fuliza. They have gone viral and so has their criticism as the increase in the debt pressure and digital bullying incited the Central Bank to act.

In Nigeria, dozens of quick loan apps, most of which are offshore related, were sanctioned by the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, and delisted. However, many we re-named and re-appeared. Unregulated fintech are increasing in Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa due to increasing trends of mobile money. The trend is quite clear: technology at the cost of regulation, and profit at ethics.

Regulation Helps – But It Is Not Enough

African administrations are on the alert. They now license digital lending by the Central Bank of Kenya. Nigeria enforced stricter measures on the protection of data and outlawed organised blackmail and harassment for debt collection purposes. The South African government regulates the cost through the National Credit Regulator.

These steps matter. However, they are reactive rather than proactive. It takes the negative pain of heinous public crimes or scandals before regulators take action. Because of this, it is devastatingly worse that with some fragmentation of enforcement, companies arbitrarily have been able to hop jurisdictions, moving between those with a stiffer movement system and those with a less stiff one.

Africa should have standardised digital credit, preferably within the field of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). A common continental standard would be able to guarantee:

• Complete transparency instead of masqueraded service fees.
• Limit in data-use and audit trails on data-use.
• Outlaw recovery methods based on harassment.
• Introduce egional borrower dispute mechanisms.

Even so, financial sovereignty will not be ensured unless regulation is upheld by banning coercive tactics used by lenders when trying to recover borrowed money from borrowers.

Beyond Regulation – Towards Financial Sovereignty

Cooperative finance has a long history in Africa. These systems exist on social trust, community reinvestment, accountability. The challenge and opportunity lies in how to digitise these indigenous models rather than bring in outside templates that aim at extracting profits.

Consider online lending cooperatives owned by users that have members who are also shareholders. Consider communal credit fund depositories, which are supported by open governance and split up. Consider having open-source credit-scoring systems, whose operation is directed by social organisations or co-operatives and not cartels and greedy private investors.

Innovation would not be substituted by these models. Rather, with local ownership and dignity these models would redefine it. Authentic inclusion also needs to be participation in the governance, rather than the dependency of imported applications.

A Financial Revolution -But Whose?

The digital finance revolution that Africa has been experiencing is not imaginary, but a revolution is assessed in terms of results, not press releases. Does instant credit simply lead to bond citizens indebted to never ending cycles of micro-debt? Does it make the small traders strong or are the old extractive hierarchies being reproduced in a new form?

African Arguments for more

by DEAN BAKER

I haven’t given my diatribe on cheap drugs for a while, but what the hell. It’s a huge deal and no one in a position of power gives a damn (just like the housing bubble), but I’ll keep trying. 

Just to remind everyone of where things stand, drugs are cheap. The government makes them expensive with patent monopolies and other forms of protection. 

There are all sorts of self-imagined progressive types who see their goal in life as getting the government to rein in the market to end poverty and reduce inequality. In the case of prescription drugs, the problem is the government, not the market. 

Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. They would sell for $10, $20, or $30 per prescription in a free market. The reason people end up paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for drugs they need for their health or life is because the government prevents competition that would bring prices down close to the drug’s cost. 

We need to pay for the development of drugs, but we don’t need patent monopolies for that. We used to spend over $50 billion a year for biomedical research through the NIH and other government agencies. We would need to spend perhaps three times that amount to replace the research now supported through patent monopolies. 

That additional $100 billion sounds like a lot of money, except we would likely save on the order of $550 billion a year on what we spend on drugs. We currently spend over $720 billion a year for drugs that would likely sell for around $150 billion in a free market. 

The difference of more than $550 billion a year comes to more than $4,000 per household. It’s more than the tax breaks in Trump’s big bill. This is a huge amount of money that the government is transferring every year from the rest of us to the people in a position to benefit from patent monopolies. But somehow, we are all just supposed to accept that this is the free market. 

I was reminded of how corrupt and immoral this system is when I recorded a podcast with Joe Stiglitz, who has written extensively on intellectual property, as well as many other areas. In addition to making drugs expensive or altogether unaffordable for hundreds of millions of people around the world, these monopolies hugely hampered the response to the pandemic.

Rather than trying to get vaccines, tests, and treatments produced and distributed as widely as possible, the international community focused on setting up structures to ensure that the pharmaceutical industry would be adequately compensated. Arguably the structure already existed with the compulsory licensing terms that were put in place in the Doha round of the WTO, but that is really beside the point. 

The issue of distribution of vaccines and drugs is completely separable from the question of appropriate compensation for the pharmaceutical industry. Common sense would have dictated that the countries with the necessary technology and expertise do everything possible to maximize production of pandemic related vaccines and treatments immediately. 

The debate over appropriate compensation could have proceeded on a separate track and taken as long as necessary. There was no emergency in determining compensation for Pfizer or Moderna. If it took a year or two to iron out a fair level of compensation, that would be no big deal. Getting out the vaccines and treatments was an emergency involving tens of millions of lives. 

Some of us had vague hopes that Trump might actually do something to rein in the pharmaceutical industry. In his campaign he complained about high drug prices. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his Secretary for Health and Human Services, has made a career complaining about corruption in the industry, so there was some basis for thinking he might look to fundamentally change the industry’s business model

CEPR for more

by GREY ANDERSON

In January 2022, Richard Bruce Cheney made a surprise appearance on the floor of Congress. His return to Capitol Hill marked the anniversary of the ruckus that briefly delayed certification of election results the previous year. Cheney, accustomed to rough words from his opponents, found himself in an improvised receiving line. ‘No Republicans showed up’, the New York Times recounted,

But Democrats in the House, including the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were effervescent. After 13 years in retirement and of all-but-unimaginable changes in American life wrought by the rise and fall of President Trump, Mr Cheney and Liz Cheney were engulfed by a parade of Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the former vice president a war criminal. The Democrats shook Mr Cheney’s hand, and some embraced Ms Cheney, who introduced him to her erstwhile colleagues, saying: ‘This is my father. This is Dad.’ It was a stunning moment and an emblem of how much had changed in the Trump era.

Pelosi praised his attendance, declaring that, whatever past quarrels, they had never differed over their commitment to ‘honoring our oath of office to support and defend the Constitution’; Steny Hoyer saluted Liz Cheney ‘for having the courage to stand up for truth’; Adam Schiff looked back misty-eyed to ‘a time when there were broad policy differences, but there were no differences when it came to both parties’ devotion to the idea of democracy’. ‘It’s an important historical event’, Cheney explained when asked what drew him to Washington to commemorate the January 6^th ‘insurrection’: ‘I was honoured and proud . . . to recognize this anniversary, to commend the heroic actions of law enforcement that day, and to reaffirm our dedication to the Constitution’. Media accolades did not save his daughter’s seat in Congress from a MAGA primary challenge, although the Resistance circuit offered a lucrative fallback. When he endorsed Kamala Harris last September, Cheney said of Trump ‘there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic’.

Twenty-five years ago, Cheney displayed a different attitude towards the sacral rites of democratic transition. As lawyers contested George W. Bush’s razor-thin Florida margin, his running mate took charge of a privately funded transition operation based at his McLean residence, preparing a presidential team before an official victor was declared. Recounts stalled in Miami-Dade and the courts deliberated over ‘hanging chads’; Cheney nonetheless pressed ahead, bringing in Ari Fleischer as spokesman and vetting cabinet nominees all while the General Services Administration refused to release federal resources. He declared Florida’s certification to be conclusive, dismissed Gore’s legal challenges as an exercise in denial and warned that any hesitation in assembling a government would jeopardize national security. Meetings with congressional leaders in Austin followed, signalling that the administration-in-waiting intended to behave as though the matter were settled. The haste was not improvised. In truth, the VP-elect had devoted the better part of a long career to reflection on the relays of power.

He wasn’t born to it. Raised in Wyoming by New Dealer parents, Cheney won admission to Yale through connections of his future wife, Lynne, only to flunk out twice. A period of drift and minor alcohol-related scrapes back West ended when she insisted on a more disciplined course. Five draft deferments later, by his mid-thirties he was serving in the Office of Economic Opportunity as deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, whom he followed into the Ford Administration and eventually replaced as chief of staff to the president. A Watergate survivor, he learned the lesson of Nixon’s collapse: ‘Don and I survived and prospered in that environment because we didn’t leave a lot of paper lying around’, he observed. At the White House he proved a virtuoso of bureaucratic manoeuvre. He and Rumsfeld eased Rockefeller off the 1976 ticket, sidelined Kissinger and conspired to extinguish détente. Quiet, relentless, Cheney rarely took credit; he showed an appetite for minutiae and stamina for unglamorous work, seeing to it that the West Wing plumbing got fixed and cruets were replaced on the presidential table. Colleagues remembered a discreet, preternaturally middle-aged man, his distinguishing features a lawless smirk and ‘snake-cold eyes, like a Cheyenne gambler’s’, as another Ford adviser recalled.

NLR for more

by MARY J. SCOURBOUTAKOS

It starts with a slight scratchiness at the back of your throat.

Then, a sneeze.

Then coughing, sniffling and full-on congestion, with or without fever, for a few insufferable days.

Viral upper respiratory tract infections – also known as the common cold – afflict everyone, typically three times per year, lasting, on average, nine days.

Colds don’t respond to antibiotics, and most over-the-counter medications deliver modest results at best.

In recent years, research has emerged demonstrating the effectiveness of the ancient practice of nasal saline irrigation in fighting the common cold in both adults and children.

Not only does nasal saline irrigation decrease the duration of illness, it also reduces viral transmission to other people, minimizes the need for antibiotics and could even lower a patient’s risk of hospitalization. Better yet, it costs pennies and doesn’t require a prescription.

I’m both an adjunct assistant professor of medicine and a practicing physician. As a family doctor, I see the common cold every day. My patients are usually skeptical when I first recommend nasal saline irrigation. However, they frequently return to tell me that this practice has changed their life. Not only does it help with upper respiratory viruses, but it also helps manage allergies, chronic congestion, postnasal drip and recurrent sinus infections.

What is nasal saline irrigation?

Nasal saline irrigation is a process by which the nasal cavity is bathed in a saltwater solution. In some studies, this is accomplished using a pump-action spray bottle.

In others, participants used a traditional neti pot, which is a vessel resembling a teapot.

This practice of nasal irrigation originated in the Ayurvedic tradition, which is a system of alternative medicine from India dating back more than 5,000 years.

The neti pot can be traced back to the 15th century. It garnered mainstream interest in the U.S. in 2012 after Dr. Oz demonstrated it on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” But it’s not the only device that has historically been employed for such purposes. Ancient Greek and Roman physicians had their own nasal lavage devices. Such practices were even discussed in medical journals such as The Lancet over a century ago, in 1902.

How does nasal saline irrigation work?

Nasal saline has a few key benefits. First, it physically flushes debris out of the nasal passage. This not only includes mucus and crust, but also the virus itself, along with allergens and other environmental contaminants.

The Conversation for more