Medicine is slowly waking up to the incredible healing powers of vitamin C. According to new research, it can kill ‘superbug’ varieties of tuberculosis (TB) bacteria that have grown immune to every available drug, giving hope to millions of people who are infected every year.
The vitamin kills multi-drug-resistant TB bacteria, which affects 650,000 worldwide every year, and is responsible for most of the annual 1.4 million deaths the disease causes.
The bacteria are resistant to every drug, including isoniazid, the first-line treatment-which means medicine doesn’t have an answer to a superbug that is spreading through the developing world.
And researchers at Yeshiva University made the discovery entirely by accident. They were testing a theory that the TB bacteria would develop resistance to the drug if it was mixed with cysteine, an amino acid that is an active agent in vitamin C. However, the entire culture of bacteria was wiped out by the vitamin. Astonished by their happy discovery, the researchers think that cysteine acts as a reducing agent that may supercharge drugs such as isoniazid.
(Source: Nature Communications, 2013; 4, doi: 10.1038/ncomms2898).
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