London - Vitamin C can kill multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in the laboratory, scientists have found. The surprise discovery may point to a new way of tackling this increasingly hard-to-treat infection, the US study authors from Yeshiva University say in Nature Communications.
An estimated 650,000 people worldwide have multidrug-resistant TB.
Studies are now needed to see if a treatment that works using the same action as vitamin C would be useful as a TB drug in humans.
While the findings of this study appear promising, further research to confirm the observations would be essential before Vitamin C can be used to supplement TB treatment”
TB is caused by infection with the bacterium M. tuberculosis. Doctors are discovering that the drugs they normally use to treat the infection no longer work because TB has developed resistance due to improper use of antibiotics, for example, when patients do not finish the full course of their medicine.
