Accidental find shows Vitamin C kills TB

A team from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York made the accidental find while researching how TB bacteria become resistant to the TB drug isoniazid.

The researchers added isoniazid and a “reducing agent” known as cysteine to the TB in a test tube, expecting the bacteria to develop drug resistance.

Instead, the team “ended up killing off the culture”, according to the study’s senior author William Jacobs, who said the result was “totally unexpected”.

Reducing agents chemically reduce other substances.

The team then replaced the cysteine in the experiment with another reducing agent — Vitamin C.

It, too, killed the bacteria.

“I was in disbelief,” said Jacobs of the outcome published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Even more surprisingly … when we left out the TB drug isoniazid and just had Vitamin C alone, we discovered that Vitamin C kills tuberculosis.”

The team next tested the vitamin on drug resistant strains of TB, with the same outcome.

In the lab tests, the bacteria never developed resistance to Vitamin C — “almost like the dream drug”, Jacobs said in a video released by the college.

He stressed the effect had only been demonstrated in a test tube so far, and “we don’t know if it will work in humans”, or which dose might be useful.

In March, disease experts warned of a “very real” risk of an untreatable TB strain emerging as more and more people develop drug resistance.

In 2011, there were believed to be some 12 million TB cases in total — 630,000 of them of the multi-drug resistant (MDR) variety which does not respond to the most potent drugs — isoniazid and rifampin.

Extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB, does not respond to an even wider range of drugs.

An airborne disease of the lungs, tuberculosis is usually treatable with a six-month course of antibiotics.

Resistance to TB drugs develops when treatment fails to kill

the bacteria that causes it — either because the patient fails to follow their prescribed dosages or the drug doesn’t work.

It can also be contracted through rare forms of the disease that are directly transmissible from person to person.

MDR TB in the United States can cost as much as $US250,000 ($A256,000) per patient to treat