Most doctors probably won’t recommend picking up a drug habit this flu season, but a new study suggests that the drug methamphetamine may have flu-fighting properties.
A team of scientists from the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan recently studied how methamphetamine interacts with influenza A virus in lung cells, Fox News reported.
The team of scientists took cultures of human lung epithelial cells, which they exposed to different amounts of meth, and then infected them with an H1N1 strain of human influenza A. Within 30 to 48 hours after infection, the meth-treated cells were found to have a much lower concentration of the virus than the control group, the research team reported.
“This finding strongly encourages future work to investigate whether other compounds, structurally similar to meth, can inhibit influenza A virus production and be used to prevent or alleviate influenza A virus infection,” they wrote in their study, which was published in the PLOS ONE journal.