So yes, use distilled water... but in terms of risk factor, I don't think it's too high.
The olfactory epithelium allows external substances deeper into the body tissue than other boundaries in order to enable the sense of smell.
You can inhale (or be exposed by a wound in the skin) a single droplet of water containing Acanthamoeba and get sick and die. That would be a rare occurrence, but it does happen.
You can drink 10,000 liters of water full of it and never get sick, it rides down the slip-and-slide of your throat into your stomach where your stomach acid destroys it. It is likely that half of all people in the United States drank some today.
Several types of bacteria are like this, like staph and legionella, you can eat and drink them but the second they get in your nose or lungs (or blood via a cut or scrape): no bueno.
Unless, like the article suggests, you have an immune-compromising condition you have very little to be afraid of.
Just don't go swimming in warm stagnant water no matter how healthy you are.
They’ll never get my $0.99!
/s
- Used distilled water. - Used boiled water.
Use the salt packets with both. It has been amazing for me during the allergy season. But have to be careful.
To prepend to that list for completeness: Using distilled water and boiling it.
Arguably overkill, though.
However, that would make the machine prone to bacterial and scale buildup, and hard to clean. Ease of cleaning is the real reason to use only distilled water in CPAP machines.
But I haven't found an efficient way to reliably boil and then cool water so that it's close to the right temperature at the end. I also haven't figured out a way to microwave water to a boil and then set an alarm for just the right amount of time.
If anyone has tips I'm all ears!
Most microorganisms start dying above 50C (122F) or so. Roughly an hour at 50C should sufficiently pasteurize water for drinking. Or around 15 minutes at 60C and so forth. As the temperature increases the required time decreases. The common advice to boil water to render it safe for drinking is conservative and is given for a number of reasons: to err on the side of caution; because there are extremophiles that can survive at higher temperatures; because water boiling is an easily visible cue; and because by the time water reaches boiling it is sterilized so there's no need to time it (which is something people can screw up).
I found two sources on the temperature resistance of Naegleria fowleri. First the CDC [0] says it grows best at 46C (115F) and survives minutes or hours at 50-65C (122-149F). I also found a paper [1] which showed no detectable Naegleria fowleri after pasteurization at 68C (154F), unfortunately it didn't give a time though.
The upshot of all this is that Naegleria fowleri is somewhat temperature tolerant but isn't an extremophile; it's killed off on a temperature-time scale that's reasonably typical for water-borne pathogens. By the time water reaches 95C (203F) it is 100% dead and probably was already by the time the water reached 70-80C (158-176F).
> For nasal rinsing, the CDC recommends using boiled, sterile, or distilled water. "If tap water is used, it should be boiled for a minimum of 1 minute, or 3 minutes in elevations >1,980 meters, and cooled before use,"
I want to blame the tap water, and also don't want to let the Neti off the hook here. And the Amoeba clearly isn't intelligent enough to be the culprit here.
Upvotes for whoever comes up with the most extreme response they can think of.
My nasal rinse has red text that says, "Warning: Do not use tap water unless sterilized by boiling." Given the absolute proliferation of useless warnings, we all ignore a dozen such notices on a typical day. What it should say is, "Warning: Death or serious injury may result from the use of tap water. Google species name for more information. The following options are safe..."
We should breed the amoeba and purposely add it to our water supply, making the chance of infection incredibly high while simultaneously raising awareness.
It's already widely know that distilled water is the way to use a neti pot. Doctors that recommended the neti pot to me were very explicit about only using distliled water with it. It's printed on the box and the instructions for the neti pots that it's for use with distilled water only. If people hear or read those words and then just fill it with tap water, then that's Darwinism at work.
It says that you can eliminate the risk by boiling the water. we need to require that all of these have an electric kettle element that raises the water temperature to boiling before it enters the nasal cavity.
I've read multiple articles like this and always wondered. I know at least one intelligent woman who assumes tap water meant just plain tap water. I'm not so sure.
> For nasal rinsing, the CDC recommends using boiled, sterile, or distilled water. "If tap water is used, it should be boiled for a minimum of 1 minute, or 3 minutes in elevations >1,980 meters, and cooled before use," the researchers write.
The point is that nobody uses tap water in their nose. They always do something to the tap water that changes it so dramatically that nobody would consider it tap water anymore. They use salt water, not tap water.
As such, these instructions don’t address them in their minds.
Hari Om Tat Sat
That being said, I can't imagine it to help, I'm usually so stopped up I don't see how I wouldn't just waterboard myself.
instead of requiring distilled water on tap for Neti Pot users...
My phone case and cigarettes are not in the same risk category, but they get the same prop 65 warning.
I'm not a full nettipot convert, but last year I did start using the squeeze-bottle version during pollen season, and was able to get over my extreme aversion to waterboarding myself. It takes a try or two, but eventually you get the hang of it and it actually feels quite nice. And if you haven't done it in a while, the snot you blow out the first time will be quite dirty and gross.
