I Learned Something New!

[RabbitDad]

Apparently you really can teach an old guy new tricks.
Yesterday I was talking to a lady in a gun store. She was explaining that she had a wide variety of health problems. Some genetic & some from a previous job working in a chemical plant.
Then she caught Covid 19. Her brother got it at the same time but he wasn't as bad off.
Her pharmacist suggested that she drink bottled water, treated with a specific brand of water purification crystals. (I forget the brand but can find out if anyone is interested.)
The main ingredients were chlorine and food grade hydrogen peroxide.
While this isn't harmful to people OR ANIMALS it's very toxic for viruses & such.
She decided she had nothing to lose except for the few dollars involved so she tried it.
Her blood oxygen level went up from 74 to 95! She no longer needed supplement oxygen 24/7 or her CPAP thing while sleeping.
She recovered from Covid 19 almost instantly too.
Her brother was hospitalized for Covid too and was to be released from the hospital in a few days. While sitting in a chair, he apparently fell over dead! Note that he wasn't drinking the treated water. Also note that I don't know what he actually died from or if it really would have helped if he did try it.
I read the label on the package and it does mention the alleged benefits besides purifying water. Amazing, it makes perfect sense, yet I would have never thought of that on my own.
I'm not a doctor (pretended I was as a little kid...) or a veterinarian so I'm not providing medical advice! Merely passing on what I heard.
I've never been overly concerned with Covid or it's variants, after all, it was made in China so of course it didn't work as planned. I'm reasonably confident that our rabbits are safe from it as well.
My thought is this... it might be worth providing treated water to our rabbits as they seem prone to a variety of viruses & diseases.
A side note... We get our water from our own private well. We have the water tested periodically for contaminants etc. It's always been fine but I started treating it with hydrogen peroxide just over a year ago as a preventative measure.
Thinking back there may have been a major, positive side effect!
We moved from the valley, about sea level, to over 6,500' elevation.
It didn't take much physical exertion for me to have difficulty breathing. Immediately after treating our water, I was back to normal.
I didn't make the connection before, just assumed that my body adjusted to the higher elevation. It's very possible that it was treating the water that helped.
My son and I both caught the Kung Flu several months ago (like everyone else) but it was basically nothing. Without the random tests we wouldn't have even known we had it. That too "may" have been due to our water.
To be honest, I don't know if any of this is real or not but I have to admit, that the circumstantial evidence points in the direction that it is.
It's certainly worth a try on our rabbit population.
Your mileage may vary.

 

[Bunnies4me]

Hydrogen peroxide breaks down in the presence of sunlight & water. I use bleach to soak barley and wheat seeds before I sprout them to prevent mould, by the time they've sprouted 5-7 days it's fully broken down and safe to feed out. However I still get little bugs that breed in my current seed sprouting set up so I've resorted to feeding barley as a dry seed until I've got it sorted. Some people don't agree with bleaching seeds first, and say white vinegar does the same thing. Scientifically, I can't see how. I tried white vinegar and thought it made the deterioration process faster. Not sure why, but I wonder if mould grows well in an acidic environment. Just had a rabbit recover from ringworm and that's one time you do Not feed ACV water to a rabbit, as it makes the ringworm grow faster (again, ringworm is a fungus, so same family as mould).

 

[RabbitDad]

The fungus is amoungus!

 

[eco2pia]

Hmm. I would strongly hesitate to base my decision making on one anecdotal story. This is how urban legends and rumors start. There are a million reasons why this woman happened to get better at this particular moment in time.

However, if anyone is bent on believing the water purification tablets had any thing to do with it, the most likely explanation for such an effect is that the woman's water source was not clean, and by purifying the water you remove additional burden from your immune system. This is a well documented phenomenon in immunology, to put it in lay terms, if you think of your immune system as an army, if it is fighting a million skirmishes on several fronts it will be spread too thin. If you eliminate the extra sources of potential infection you allow your immune system to focus on enemy number 1, and it becomes more effective.

This doesn't mean just removing contamination from your water, it means avoiding allergens or food sensitivities like the plague if you are sick. Some of us may not tolerate milk for instance, but regularly cheat with cheese or ice cream, but that is not a good idea during illness, nor is petting the cute neighbor kitty if you are mildly allergic.

The point is things you may normally "tolerate" when healthy often become a bigger problem when you are sick, and in some cases you can create a chronic autoimmune response even, if you happen to be genetically predisposed to such things.