JRG: How long have you been swishing with HOCl?
JW: I’ve been swishing with HOCl for probably 10 years. And I got into it because I started to learn about HOCl, doing all the chemistry and the biology in support of what was at the time my job, developing the characteristics, the profile of very pure HOCl that the company was making.
JRG: You were a pioneer in oral use of HOCl.
JW: Yes, I was a pioneer. The company was looking at all kinds of applications and providing free HOCl to a lot of people to say, try this, try this on your skin, on your wound, in your eye. And we pretty quickly realized that there was a big benefit from HOCl orally for a lot of reasons.
Well, I came to the conclusion that everybody should be doing it. We were seeing, as you know, lots of good benefits from HOCl applications on scalds and on wounds, effects on healing. And I think in terms of public health, the impact should be global from an adoption of something so simple as this twice daily swish.
JRG: Tell me the order of your dental hygiene care. When do you incorporate your swishing?
JW: It’s at the end of the process. That is, after I’ve used an electronic toothbrush. And then I swish for no less than half a minute. And usually, I can putter around at the sink and do other things and get a minute of swishing. And then I spit it out.
It’s hypochlorous acid, so it has a pH well below neutral. Not at all offensive or unphysiological. The pH of hypochlorous acid is about the same as the pH of your skin, your sweat, and some other body fluids. But it doesn’t last long.
As an effect in your mouth, it doesn’t last long, as HOCl has some residual effects that are important. And that is particularly the case where there are wounds. And the bleeding point in your gum is actually a wound, because it means the mucosa is not intact. So, there are what I call “knock-on effects” that HOCl leaves behind, and those are going to continue.
Related article: A better story for oral and biological health: From antimicrobial force to ecological regulation
JRG: How would you describe HOCl’s action, and how does NCT enter the picture?
JW: Remember, it’s lightning fast. It reacts with everything. HOCl is part of our innate immune system. We all rely on it. You do; I do. We all make it. Just about every living thing makes it. Our dogs, our pets. If you’re a fruit fly, you depend on HOCl for your innate reaction to injury, to insult, to infection. It reacts with everything.
It doesn’t have any kind of discriminatory capacity. So, when one of your white blood cells scoops up a staphylococcus or something harmful, HOCl springs into action and it reacts with that staphylococcus and kills it. And all this happens in milliseconds. A really remarkable process. But then what happens to the HOCl that didn’t kill the Staphylococcus?
It’s going to react most with what there’s most of around it. And that’s where this wondrous NCT phenomenon comes in. What is most around HOCl in your white blood cell is an amino acid, taurine. It’s the most abundant amino acid in your body.
HOCl reacts with it. It halogenates it. That’s the chemical term. It converts it into something we call NCT. And then NCT is a remarkable compound. It’s antimicrobial. It’s antifungal. It’s antibacterial. Antiviral.
It promotes healing. It promotes all the kinds of things that must happen in a wound or in your damaged gum that make wounds heal. And we think that that’s really one of the great benefits of HOCl is its capacity to leave a big footprint. It leaves behind a modification of taurine, converts it to NCT, and that NCT is not lightning fast. It’s slow and steady.
JRG: Is the manufactured HOCl identical to the endogenous HOCl manufactured by the white blood cells?
JW: This is a really good point, because I think there isn’t really another equivalent. Industry can make HOCl in a number of ways, but mostly by using salt water and electrical energy. We can make a substance that is the exact equivalent of what you make in your white blood cells. So, we can make a natural human body product, and we can make it on a scale that nothing else matches.
When you think about human body natural products that are a part of the pharmaceutical industry’s offerings, you think of things like insulin, right?
We can make an insulin that pretty much mimics exactly what our bodies make and we can use it therapeutically or in preventive ways, but you can’t make it by the hundreds of kilograms. You can’t make it on a scale that enables us to think realistically of tons of HOCl being used regularly all over the world for improvement in oral health. That’s a pretty remarkable statement to be able to make, that this natural human product is makeable at industrial level. And they are the same.
There’s no chemical difference between what gets generated by a white blood cell that has just scooped up a Staphylococcus and what we can make with controlled electrolysis of salt and water.
JRG: What is more important for the body, HOCl or the NCT that HOCl produces?
JW: They’re both important. HOCl is the speedster here. And it’s all about the chemistry of reaction energy that is needed to start things off. HOCl reacts with protein, with fats, lipids, and cell membranes, the carbohydrates. NCT is more selective, slower acting.
But the half-life now is extended. NCT is going to bring benefits for quite some time. And we don’t have a good handle on that. But it’s certainly in a wound that’s going to go on for hours. Whereas HOCl forms in milliseconds and it attacks Staphylococcus and other pathogens in milliseconds.
So, it’s a very big difference. And NCT ultimately passes on its active chlorine atom. It does that, stimulating physiological reactions for quite some time after the exposure and the trigger.
Think of them as one as the first responder, and then that first responder passes off to the primary caregiver that’s going to continue the good work, but much more slowly.
JRG: Do you worry that good bacteria will also be destroyed by HOCl?
JW: I think the good stuff just comes back so quickly. It belongs there, right? The good bacteria in your mouth are a part of your oral flora, and they flourish and they do so quickly. The pathogens, the things that are doing damage, are affected by HOCl. Good bacteria may certainly be affected by HOCl, but recovery — remember these bacteria multiply about every 20 minutes — doesn’t take long for the bacteria that belong there, now that you’ve started to solve the problem of the pathogens being eliminated.
JRG: Is there competition between good and bad bacteria?
JW: Bad bacteria can crowd out the good ones. They can take over sites that are normally populated by a healthy flora. And I think that’s one of the complexities of what goes on in your mouth. And as I said already, we put an awful lot of things in our mouth that there’s a lot of insults to the tissues in the mouth, perhaps more so than any other part of your body. Lots of different chemicals, lots of different microbes. So, maintaining a healthy flora and stopping the bad ones from taking over those receptor sites, getting rid of them is always advantageous. The normal flora will flourish right back and bind to receptor sites and to tissues in the way they normally should.
JRG: Besides swishing the HOCl around in the mouth, is it a good idea to gargle with it as well, and use nasal spray?
JW: I think gargling with HOCl is a very effective way to ward off organisms, particularly viruses that attach to the mucosa at the back of your throat. Also, the nose, I routinely use nasal spray of HOCl, particularly if I’m doing something like traveling, where I’m going to be exposed to a lot of potential foreign viruses.
I’m going to use a nasal spray because, just like coronaviruses, most of those virus infections start out by binding to cells up your nose and at the very back of your throat. And if you can stop that happening and shut that down with HOCl, then you’re going to benefit. And I know I do from that routine.
All these mucosal surfaces that are subject to contamination and infection benefit from routine use of hypochlorous solutions.
JRG: Can NCT generated in the mouth reach other parts and assist in healing?
JW: NCT that is generated goes into the circulating plasma. I actually think there’s probably a place for NCT for treating systemic disease inflammation. I think that’s highly likely. We’re not there and part of the reason for that is that it’s a relatively new piece of science, it’s not made its way into any kind of therapeutic FDA approved drug formulation. But I think it’s highly likely that this compound, this natural compound, can be a part of relief of systemic inflammation.
My guess is that oral swishing is generating NCT in the mouth tissues in enough quantities that it circulates and goes all the way to an arthritic lesion that might be in a lower limb.
JRG: In many ways HOCl’s benefit can be seen as largely an NCT precursor?
JW: That’s right. I think it is two for one. I think the wondrous thing about HOCl is that it has these rapid, very beneficial effects on what I like to call insults, infections, lesions, damage, injury, but it leaves behind something that nature has evolved to take advantage of.
And there must be a reason when you look at the millions of years of evolution: why is taurine our most frequently found amino acid in our body fluids? It’s there for a good reason. Now taurine has some other benefits. There are lots of experimental studies on taurine and its benefits on a number of physiological systems.
One of them, in my view, is it sponges up that HOCl and carries on the good work.
JRG: What do you tell dentists and other health professionals about the sanitizing and disinfecting of HOCl?
JW: HOCl is the finest environmental sanitizer and disinfectant. And as I think you know, we have petitioned the World Health Organization to add HOCl to its essential medicines list for sanitizing and disinfecting. And we were successful in 2025. And now the WHO has made this recommendation worldwide, ministries of health of all nations should be sure that HOCl is available within the medicines list in each country. And a major reason for that is the safety and the power of it as an environmental disinfectant.
HOCl is the finest, the safest, and the most powerful antimicrobial disinfectant sanitizer. And, of course, it has all the benefits of being natural in the sense that we, our bodies, are accustomed to it. A lot of bad disinfectants were used to excess, especially in the pandemic.
And I think, ideally, HOCl would have been reached for as the safest environmental sanitizer and disinfectant at the time of the pandemic. And we would have avoided a lot of the bad things that came about from the use of environmental disinfectants that turned out to be actually quite toxic. And people were using them at toxic levels. That had permanent effects on quite a lot of people.
So, my ideal environmental sanitizing intervention would be HOCl, both as a surface and hard surface disinfectant. And I think aerosolizing it into the air is very likely to have a beneficial effect on airborne transmission of pathogens. That’s controversial and actually a rather difficult thing to prove, but it’s highly likely given the safety of it and the potency of it.
Very early on, we were able to show that coronavirus was very susceptible to HOCl. I think it’s lamentable that it wasn’t more widely recognized and people reverted to cheap toxic disinfectants and left a residual effect on the health of a lot of people as a result.
And I think it was a part of the reason why the World Health Organization is saying now, HOCl should be in every country. It should be a part of the essential pharmacopeia in every nation. And I’m very pleased to see that development.
JRG: What is HOCl’s role to play in the huge and growing global AMR crisis?
JW: Antibiotic resistance is a massive problem, and it’s come about from the fact that microbes respond to pressure and genetic selection and if you keep pressing on them with an antibiotic, they’ll become resistant to it. It’s often rather easy for bacteria to find a way around. That’s very difficult for that to happen with HOCl. So HOCl has a place in hospital-acquired infection control.
And by the way, a lot of those infectious organisms are brought into the hospital by people who are carriers. They carry some of those antibiotic-resistant organisms on their skin, up their nose, in their mouth. So, there is a seeding process that goes on in hospital acquired infection generation.
HOCl definitely has a place there, as there really is no solid evidence of HOCl resistance found. That just doesn’t happen with HOCl. So, I think there’s a really important role for HOCl in the future as an important tool in resisting and controlling hospital acquired infections, and particularly, those that are multi-drug resistant.
JRG: HOCl was used in the 1910s. Why isn’t it better known and used?
JW: There are several reasons. Now, remember that for a long time, for most of the 20th century, you couldn’t make it stable. And so, hospitals often made it bedside because you couldn’t put it in a bottle and ship it across the country. Now you can, so that’s a big change. The other reason is the very fact that it’s a natural product, and you can’t patent it.
It means that you can’t brand your particular HOCl because everybody else can make HOCl. And that puts it in a different category from so many other pharmaceutical and medicinal products.
The breakthrough we’ve got with recognition of its extraordinary usefulness and power and the endorsement of an international agency, WHO, I think will move HOCl into the front line. And people will find themselves depending on it. And they’ll be making it on site in large volumes in the near future. That’s my hope. 
Oral Health welcomes this original article.
About the authors
Janice Goodman is on the Oral Health Editorial Board and practices general dentistry in downtown Toronto. She is passionate about disseminating knowledge on the significance of the recent emergence and availability of Hypochlorous acid in a stable form and can be reached at jangoodman@rogers.com.
Jeffrey F. Williams, PhD, BVSc, MRCVS, microbiologist and infectious disease expert, has devoted his career to researching, inventing and bringing to market solutions that have improved the lives and health of people all over the world.