Study Finds Vitamin C Kills Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

Activist Post

In a striking, unexpected discovery, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have determined that vitamin C kills drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) bacteria in laboratory culture. The finding suggests that vitamin C added to existing TB drugs could shorten TB therapy, and it highlights a new area for drug design. The study was published today in the online journal Nature Communications.

B is caused by infection with the bacterium M. tuberculosis. In 2011, TB sickened some 8.7 million people and took some 1.4 million lives, according to the World Health Organization. Infections that fail to respond to TB drugs are a growing problem: About 650,000 people worldwide now have multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), 9 percent of whom have extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).TB is especially acute in low and middle income countries, which account for more than 95 percent of TB-related deaths, according to the World Health Organization.



The Einstein discovery arose during research into how TB bacteria become resistant to isoniazid, a potent first-line TB drug. The lead investigator and senior author of the study was William Jacobs, Jr., Ph.D., professor of microbiology & immunology and of genetics at Einstein. Dr. Jacobs is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Jacobs and his colleagues observed that isoniazid-resistant TB bacteria were deficient in a molecule called mycothiol. “We hypothesized that TB bacteria that can’t make mycothiol might contain more cysteine, an amino acid,” said Dr. Jacobs. “So, we predicted that if we added isoniazid and cysteine to isoniazid-sensitive M. tuberculosis in culture, the bacteria would develop resistance. Instead, we ended up killing off the culture— something totally unexpected.”– William Jacobs, Jr., Ph.D.

The Einstein team suspected that cysteine was helping to kill TB bacteria by acting as a “reducing agent” that triggers the production of reactive oxygen species (sometimes called free radicals), which can damage DNA.

“To test this hypothesis, we repeated the experiment using isoniazid and a different reducing agent— vitamin C,” said Dr. Jacobs. “The combination of isoniazid and vitamin C sterilized the M. tuberculosis culture. We were then amazed to discover that vitamin C by itself not only sterilized the drug-susceptible TB, but also sterilized MDR-TB and XDR-TB strains.”

To justify testing vitamin C in a clinical trial, Dr. Jacobs needed to find the molecular mechanism by which vitamin C exerted its lethal effect. More research produced the answer: Vitamin C induced what is known as a Fenton reaction, causing iron to react with other molecules to create reactive oxygen species that kill the TB bacteria.

“We don’t know whether vitamin C will work in humans, but we now have a rational basis for doing a clinical trial,” said Dr. Jacobs. “It also helps that we know vitamin C is inexpensive, widely available and very safe to use. At the very least, this work shows us a new mechanism that we can exploit to attack TB.”

The paper is titled, “Mycobacterium tuberculosis is extraordinarily sensitive to killing by a vitamin C-induced Fenton reaction.” The other contributors are Catherine Vilcheze, Ph.D., Travis Hartman and Brian Weinrick, Ph.D., all at Einstein.

The study was supported by a grant (AI26170) from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Related:  Scary, drug-resistant TB could get beat using plain old vitamin C

Vitamin C cured polio during the epidemic of 1948-49

Natural News

It's common for shills and Internet "trolls" commenting on vaccination articles to reference the "eradication of polio" as a vaccine triumph. No mention is made of how polio continues, often from polio vaccinations but under different names.

But worse than that is the shield of silence obscuring a humble small town physician who cured polio victims in the late 1940s and early 1950s using mega-dosages of vitamin C. His name was Frederick Robert Klenner, MD.

His successful healing with high-dose ascorbic acid vitamin C was ignored even after producing papers on his cures and making a presentation of his findings on polio at the Annual Session of the American Medical Association on June 10, 1949 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The allopathic medical monopoly still refuses to acknowledge mega-dose vitamin treatments today. Both orthomolecular medicine and psychiatry are marginalized, forbidding its practitioners to make claims of healing while forcing them to work obscurely in the shadow of AMA/Big Pharma's monopoly.

Polio and other mega dose vitamin C cures hidden in plain sight

Dr. Klenner was an early pioneering orthomolecular physician who treated many different maladies successfully, including polio, with massive doses of different vitamins. Vitamin C was the major medicine he employed for polio.

He had hospital privileges at Reidsville Hospital, where he delivered several babies, dubbed "vitamin C babies" by the staff. Dr. Klenner's wife worked as his only nurse and staff out of a small office in Reidsville, North Carolina. They didn't bill patients if they couldn't pay for treatments immediatley; their patients paid when they could.

Motivated by earlier orthomolecular discoveries, Dr. Klenner simply administered injections of high dose ascorbic acid vitamin C to patients with pneumonia. His trial and error method wound up curing all of them within days.

Note: No grants, no lab testing, and no cruel animal testing were required. Why? Because vitamin C is not a synthetic toxic.

Big Pharma research employs tests and experiments, to the tune of millions of dollars. This "orthodox" system entitles Big Pharma to create patented synthetic toxins that can be monopolized for big bucks with protective policing from the AMA and FDA, including the elimination of any inexpensive competition.

Dr. Klenner received his fair share of polio victims during a 1948 epidemic. He cured them all, even one with both legs paralyzed. He asserted: "When proper amounts are used, it will destroy all virus organisms. Don't expect control of a virus with 100 to 400 mg of C."

He handled the polio virus easily and inexpensively without adverse side-effects before the Salk polio vaccine was introduced. But Dr. Klenner's colleagues simply ignored him.

Dr. Klenner once said, "Some physicians would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid because in their finite minds it exists only as a vitamin." This still happens when healing occurs in plain sight. Recently in New Zealand, Alan Smith was cured of double pneumonia and leukemia with mega-dose IV C and a special type of oral C. He had been on life support and was within a day from having the plug pulled until the Smith family forced the hospital to administer mega-dose C.

After the hospital stopped administering adequate IV C dosages, Alan's family sneaked in special oral liposome encapsulated C packages, which are even better at getting the C into tissue cells than IV C. Liposome encapsulated C can be ordered online or made at home.

After a few short weeks, Alan walked out of the hospital in good health, an example that Dr. Klenner would have no-doubt been proud of.

Serious Questions About Pharma

Epoch Times, Apr. 26, 2011

Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at pharmaceutical companies’ profits in the Fortune 500 list of the world’s most profitable companies. She found that the top 10 pharmaceutical companies’ combined profits exceed the combined profits of all the 490 remaining companies!

A new, unproven anticancer drug can be very expensive.

If the NHS objects to a physician using this drug, U.K. newspapers that print what pharma asks them to print will go to bat for the physician against the NHS and the U.K. government, launching half-page photos of a sorrowful mom surrounded by a grieving family she is doomed to leave is she doesn’t get the new wonder drug.

Vitamin C truths are excluded from U.K. newspapers, which print only what won’t damage pharma. A double-page article about vitamin C never mentioned that vitamin C cures many cancers. Cancer articles never mention vitamin C.

I noticed that aspartame was in the vitamin C tablets I bought at the airport. I wondered: If I were a doctor working for that company, knowing that vitamin C cures, prevents, or delays 100 diseases on which my profits depended, how would I protect my company’s profits and my multimillionaire lifestyle?

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Cancer, Vitamin C & Linus Pauling

www.encognitive.com
Video: Dr. Robert Rowen, MD on the Uses and Efficacy of Intravenous Vitamin C

Dr. Robert Rowen is internationally known for his work in the field of complementary/alternative/integrative medicine. He is affectionately known as the “Father of Medical Freedom” for pioneering the nation’s first statutory protection for alternative medicine in 1990 in Alaska, against a concerted opposition from the organized medical community and an imported “quackbuster”. A few years later, the Alaska governor appointed him to a term on the state medical board against overwhelming opposition from the medical establishment. His appointment was ultimately confirmed by the legislature with overwhelming public support. The rare medical freedom he enjoyed in Alaska enabled him to greatly expand knowledge and experience in a multitude of disciplines and therapies not normally found in medicine. Jumping into alternative medicine in 1983 through a practice in acupuncture, he quickly expanded to nutritional medicine, chelation therapy, oxidation therapy, homeopathy and herbal medicine, and took intensive training in neural therapy and prolotherapy to help treat and eliminate acute and chronic pain. Alaska’s laws enabled him to work extensively with innovative cancer therapies, ozone, and ultraviolet blood irradiation therapy. He is internationally known and respected for training hundreds of open-minded physicians in these techniques from around the world.

Action Alert—Now the FDA Is Going After Vitamin C!

Alliance for Natural Health

The FDA has just notified small pharmacies that they will no longer be allowed to manufacture or distribute injectable vitamin C—despite its remarkable power to heal conditions that conventional medicine can’t touch. Please help reverse this outrageous decision!

Let’s get this straight. The government acknowledges the risk of a worldwide flu pandemic. It acknowledges that conventional drugs cannot cure big viruses-like the mononucleosis and hepatitis viruses, many influenza viruses, and many others. It acknowledges that many bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics and are killing increasing thousands. It acknowledges the risk of a worldwide drug-resistant TB pandemic.
Despite acknowledging all this, it now insists on wiping out one of the best potential treatments for these conditions and for certain cancers as well. And why is this being done? What possible rationale is offered? Because it’s dangerous? No. Because it can’t be patented and therefore won’t be taken through the standard FDA approval process. No matter that vitamin C is one of the least toxic components of our food supply and liquid forms of it have been used safely for decades.

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