Does Vitamin D Deficiency Cause
Flu Pandemics Colds and Infections?
Vitamin D-3
is considered the best form.
there is some controversy re: proper dosage and contraindications.
The
Real
Reason Flu Hits In Winter
And How To Stop It Naturally
Dr.
Robert J. Rowen, MD
Second Opinion Health Alert
12-15-6
For
decades we've heard the myth that flu strikes in winter because of the
colder weather. But numerous studies have all debunked that theory.
Studies have shown that flu hits the tropics in their "winter" when
it's still quite warm (usually during the rainy season).
No, there's another reason flu hits in winter. And it gives
you an easy way to stop the flu before it hits. And it doesn't involve
getting a flu shot.
We already know
that our bodies produce a lot less vitamin D during the winter. But is
it possible the reduced vitamin D levels in winter contribute to the
flu?
The evidence is there. Years ago,
an observant British general practitioner, R. Edgar Hope-Simpson,
connected influenza epidemics in the northern hemisphere with winter
solstice. So, flu hits right when vitamin D levels begin to plummet.
Conventional medicine has largely ignored his work, until now.
Just this year, two major medical journals released a report
written by Dr. John Cannell, a California psychiatrist at the
Atascadero State Hospital in California. This is a maximum security
facility for the criminally insane. In his report, Dr. Cannell noted
that wards all around his got hit hard with a severe flu-like outbreak
in April 2005. None of his 32 patients caught the flu - even after they
mingled with infected inmates from other wards.
Dr.
Cannell wondered why his ward avoided the flu when it hit all the
others. He soon realized it was the high doses of vitamin D he
prescribed to all the men on his ward. He had found that his patients,
like most other people in the industrial world, had a deficiency. (He
must be one of the very few psychiatrists that pays attention to
nutrition!) His efforts to correct the deficiency boosted their immune
system and completely protected them from the flu.
Why does it work? Science recently discovered that vitamin D
stimulates your white blood cells to make a substance called
cathelicidin. Researchers haven't studied this chemical on the flu
virus yet, but they have previously reported that it attacks a wide
variety of pathogens. These include fungi, viruses, bacteria, and even
tuberculosis.
So, it turns out that my
suggestions for you to have your vitamin D levels checked this time of
year were right on target. But now, armed with this new information, I
don't even think it's necessary to spend the money on a test. Vitamin D
is cheap. And it stimulates your body to make what might be the
ultimate antibiotic! One with no toxicity at all and only kills those
organisms invading you (not your own cells).
Arm
yourself with the incredible protection of vitamin D. Get sunlight when
you can. Just be sure not to burn. If you are mostly indoors, I
strongly suggest that you add vitamin D to your daily regimen. I
recommend 5,000 IU per day. I see no downside to this dose, especially
in the winter months!
Yours for better
health and medical freedom,
Robert Jay Rowen, MD
Ref: FASEB Journal July 2006; Epidemiology and Infection,
online, December 2006.
Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D
15
Sep 2006
In early April of
2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi:
upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for
the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It
was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an
epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the
next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more
Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the
Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people
in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American
society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon
Street after Hurricane Katrina.
It's only a question
of when a pandemic will come, not if it will come. Influenza A
pandemics come every 30 years or so, severe ones every hundred years or
so. The last pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, occurred in 1968 - killing
34,000 Americans. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic killed more than
500,000 Americans. So many millions died in other countries, they
couldn't bury the bodies. Young healthy adults, in the prime of their
lives in the morning, drowning in their own inflammation by noon,
grossly discolored by sunset, were dead at midnight. Their body's own
broad-spectrum natural antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides,
seemed nowhere to be found. An overwhelming immune response to the
influenza virus - white blood cells releasing large amounts of
inflammatory agents called cytokines and chemokines into the lungs of
the doomed - resulted in millions of deaths in 1918.
As
I am now a psychiatrist, and no longer a general practitioner, I was
not directly involved in fighting the influenza epidemic in our
hospital. However, our internal medicine specialists worked overtime as
they diagnosed and treated a rapidly increasing number of stricken
patients. Our Chief Medical Officer quarantined one ward after another
as more and more patients were gripped with the chills, fever, cough,
and severe body aches that typifies the clinical presentation of
influenza A.
Epidemic influenza kills a million
people in the world every year by causing pneumonia, “the
captain of the men of death.” These epidemics are often
explosive; the word influenza comes from Italian (Medieval Latin
?nfluentia) or influence, because of the belief that the sudden and
abrupt epidemics were due to the influence of some extraterrestrial
force. One seventeenth century observer described it well when he
wrote, “suddenly a Distemper arose, as if sent by some blast
from the stars, which laid hold on very many together: that in some
towns, in the space of a week, above a thousand people fell sick
together.”
I guess our hospital was
under luckier stars as only about 12% of our patients were infected and
no one died. However, as the epidemic progressed, I noticed something
unusual. First, the ward below mine was infected, and then the ward on
my right, left, and across the hall - but no patients on my ward became
ill. My patients had intermingled with patients from infected wards
before the quarantines. The nurses on my unit cross-covered on infected
wards. Surely, my patients were exposed to the influenza A virus. How
did my patients escape infection from what some think is the most
infectious of all the respiratory viruses?
My
patients were no younger, no healthier, and in no obvious way different
from patients on other wards. Like other wards, my patients are mostly
African Americans who came from the same prisons and jails as patients
on the infected wards. They were prescribed a similar assortment of
powerful psychotropic medications we use throughout the hospital to
reduce the symptoms of psychosis, depression, and violent mood swings
and to try to prevent patients from killing themselves or attacking
other patients and the nursing staff. If my patients were similar to
the patients on all the adjoining wards, why didn't even one of my
patients catch the flu?
A short while later, a
group of scientists from UCLA published a remarkable paper in the
prestigious journal, Nature. The UCLA group confirmed two other recent
studies, showing that a naturally occurring steroid hormone - a hormone
most of us take for granted - was, in effect, a potent antibiotic.
Instead of directly killing bacteria and viruses, the steroid hormone
under question increases the body's production of a remarkable class of
proteins, called antimicrobial peptides. The 200 known antimicrobial
peptides directly and rapidly destroy the cell walls of bacteria,
fungi, and viruses, including the influenza virus, and play a key role
in keeping the lungs free of infection. The steroid hormone that showed
these remarkable antibiotic properties was plain old vitamin D.
All
of the patients on my ward had been taking 2,000 units of vitamin D
every day for several months or longer. Could that be the reason none
of my patients caught the flu? I then contacted Professors Reinhold
Vieth and Ed Giovannucci and told them of my observations. They
immediately advised me to collect data from all the patients in the
hospital on 2,000 units of vitamin D, not just the ones on my ward, to
see if the results were statistically significant. It turns out that
the observations on my ward alone were of borderline statistical
significance and could have been due to chance alone. Administrators at
our hospital agreed, and are still attempting to collect data from all
the patients in the hospital on 2,000 or more units of vitamin D at the
time of the epidemic.
Four years ago, I became
convinced that vitamin D was unique in the vitamin world by virtue of
three facts. First, it's the only known precursor of a potent steroid
hormone, calcitriol, or activated vitamin D. Most other vitamins are
antioxidants or co-factors in enzyme reactions. Activated vitamin D -
like all steroid hormones - damasks the genome, turning protein
production on and off, as your body requires. That is, vitamin D
regulates genetic expression in hundreds of tissues throughout your
body. This means it has as many potential mechanisms of action as genes
it damasks.
Second, vitamin D does not exist in
appreciable quantities in normal human diets. True, you can get several
thousand units in a day if you feast on sardines for breakfast, herring
for lunch and salmon for dinner. The only people who ever regularly
consumed that much fish are peoples, like the Inuit, who live at the
extremes of latitude. The milk Americans depend on for their vitamin D
contains no naturally occurring vitamin D; instead, the U.S. government
requires fortified milk to be supplemented with vitamin D, but only
with what we now know to be a paltry 100 units per eight-ounce glass.
The
vitamin D steroid hormone system has always had its origins in the
skin, not in the mouth. Until quite recently, when dermatologists and
governments began warning us about the dangers of sunlight, humans made
enormous quantities of vitamin D where humans have always made it,
where naked skin meets the ultraviolet B radiation of sunlight. We just
cannot get adequate amounts of vitamin D from our diet. If we don't
expose ourselves to ultraviolet light, we must get vitamin D from
dietary supplements.
The third way vitamin D is
different from other vitamins is the dramatic difference between
natural vitamin D nutrition and the modern one. Today, most humans only
make about a thousand units of vitamin D a day from sun exposure; many
people, such as the elderly or African Americans, make much less than
that. How much did humans normally make? A single, twenty-minute, full
body exposure to summer sun will trigger the delivery of 20,000 units
of vitamin D into the circulation of most people within 48 hours.
Twenty thousand units, that's the single most important fact about
vitamin D. Compare that to the 100 units you get from a glass of milk,
or the several hundred daily units the U.S. government recommend as
“Adequate Intake.” It's what we call an
“order of magnitude” difference.
Humans
evolved naked in sub-equatorial Africa, where the sun shines directly
overhead much of the year and where our species must have obtained tens
of thousands of units of vitamin D every day, in spite of our skin
developing heavy melanin concentrations (racial pigmentation) for
protecting the deeper layers of the skin. Even after humans migrated to
temperate latitudes, where our skin rapidly lightened to allow for more
rapid vitamin D production, humans worked outdoors. However, in the
last three hundred years, we began to work indoors; in the last one
hundred years, we began to travel inside cars; in the last several
decades, we began to lather on sunblock and consciously avoid sunlight.
All of these things lower vitamin D blood levels. The inescapable
conclusion is that vitamin D levels in modern humans are not just low -
they are aberrantly low.
About three years ago,
after studying all I could about vitamin D, I began testing my
patient's vitamin D blood levels and giving them literature on vitamin
D deficiency. All their blood levels were low, which is not surprising
as vitamin D deficiency is practically universal among dark-skinned
people who live at temperate latitudes. Furthermore, my patients come
directly from prison or jail, where they get little opportunity for sun
exposure. After finding out that all my patients had low levels, many
profoundly low, I started educating them and offering to prescribe them
2,000 units of vitamin D a day, the U.S. government's “Upper
Limit.”
Could vitamin D be the reason
none of my patients got the flu? In the last several years, dozens of
medical studies have called attention to worldwide vitamin D
deficiency, especially among African Americans and the elderly, the two
groups most likely to die from influenza. Cancer, heart disease,
stroke, autoimmune disease, depression, chronic pain, depression, gum
disease, diabetes, hypertension, and a number of other diseases have
recently been associated with vitamin D deficiency. Was it possible
that influenza was as well?
Then I thought of
three mysteries that I first learned in medical school at the
University of North Carolina: (1) although the influenza virus exists
in the population year-round, influenza is a wintertime illnesses; (2)
children with vitamin D deficient rickets are much more likely to
suffer from respiratory infections; (3) the elderly in most countries
are much more likely to die in the winter than the summer (excess
wintertime mortality), and most of that excess mortality, although
listed as cardiac, is, in fact, due to influenza.
Could
vitamin D explain these three mysteries, mysteries that account for
hundreds of thousands of deaths every year? Studies have found the
influenza virus is present in the population year-around; why is it a
wintertime illness? Even the common cold got its name because it is
common in cold weather and rare in the summer. Vitamin D blood levels
are at their highest in the summer but reach their lowest levels during
the flu and cold season. Could such a simple explanation explain these
mysteries?
The British researcher, Dr. R. Edgar
Hope-Simpson, was the first to document the most mysterious feature of
epidemic influenza, its wintertime surfeit and summertime scarcity. He
theorized that an unknown “seasonal factor” was at
work, a factor that might be affecting innate human immunity.
Hope-Simpson was a general practitioner who became famous in the late
1960's after he discovered the cause of shingles. British authorities
bestowed every prize they had on him, not only because of the
importance of his discovery, but because he made the discovery own his
own, without the benefit of a university appointment, and without any
formal training in epidemiology (the detective branch of medicine that
methodically searches for clues about the cause of disease).
After
his work on shingles, Hope-Simpson spent the rest of his working life
studying influenza. He concluded a “seasonal
factor” was at work, something that was regularly and
predictably impairing human immunity in the winter and restoring it in
the summer. He discovered that communities widely separated by
longitude, but which shared similar latitude, would simultaneously
develop influenza. He discovered that influenza epidemics in Great
Britain in the 17th and 18th century occurred simultaneously in widely
separated communities, before modern transportation could possibly
explain its rapid dissemination. Hope-Simpson concluded a
“seasonal factor” was triggering these epidemics.
Whatever it was, he was certain that the deadly
“crop” of influenza that sprouts around the winter
solstice was intimately involved with solar radiation. Hope-Simpson
predicted that, once discovered, the “seasonal
factor” would “provide the key to understanding
most of the influenza problems confronting us.”
Hope-Simpson
had no way of knowing that vitamin D has profound effects on human
immunity, no way of knowing that it increases production of
broad-spectrum antimicrobial peptides, peptides that quickly destroy
the influenza virus. We have only recently learned how vitamin D
increases production of antimicrobial peptides while simultaneously
preventing the immune system from releasing too many inflammatory
cells, called chemokines and cytokines, into infected lung tissue.
In
1918, when medical scientists did autopsies on some of the fifty
million people who died during the 1918 flu pandemic, they were amazed
to find destroyed respiratory tracts; sometimes these inflammatory
cytokines had triggered the complete destruction of the normal
epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract. It was as if the flu
victims had been attacked and killed by their own immune systems. This
is the severe inflammatory reaction that vitamin D has recently been
found to prevent.
I subsequently did what physicians
have done for centuries. I experimented, first on myself and then on my
family, trying different doses of vitamin D to see if it has any
effects on viral respiratory infections. After that, as the word
spread, several of my medical colleagues experimented on themselves by
taking three-day courses of pharmacological doses (2,000 units per
kilogram per day) of vitamin D at the first sign of the flu. I also
asked numerous colleagues and friends who were taking physiological
doses of vitamin D (5,000 units per day in the winter and less, or
none, in the summer) if they ever got colds or the flu, and, if so, how
severe the infections were. I became convinced that physiological doses
of vitamin D reduce the incidence of viral respiratory infections and
that pharmacological doses significantly ameliorate the symptoms of
some viral respiratory infections if taken early in the course of the
illness. However, such observations are so personal, so likely to be
biased, that they are worthless science.
As I waited
for the hospital to finish collecting data from all the patients taking
vitamin D at the time of the outbreak - to see if it really reduced the
incidence of influenza - I decided to research the literature
thoroughly, finding all the clues in the world's medical literature
that indicated if vitamin D played any role in preventing influenza or
other viral respiratory infections. I worked on the paper for over a
year, writing it with Professor Edward Giovannucci of Harvard,
Professor Reinhold Vieth of the University of Toronto, Professor
Michael Holick of Boston University, Professor Cedric Garland of U.C.,
San Diego, as well as Dr. John Umhau of the National Institute of
Health, Sasha Madronich of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, and Dr. Bill Grant at the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health
Research Center. After numerous revisions, we submitted our paper to
the same widely respected journal where Dr. Hope-Simpson published most
of his work several decades ago.
Epidemiology
and Infection, known as The Journal of Hygiene
in Hope-Simpson's day, recently published our paper. The editor, Professor
Norman Noah, knew Dr. Hope-Simpson and helped tremendously with the
paper. In the paper, we detailed our theory that vitamin D is
Hope-Simpson's long forgotten “seasonal stimulus.”
We proposed that annual fluctuations in vitamin D levels explain the
seasonality of influenza. The periodic seasonal fluctuations in
25-hydroxy-vitamin D levels, which cause recurrent and predictable
wintertime vitamin D deficiency, predispose human populations to
influenza epidemics. We raised the possibility that influenza is a
symptom of vitamin D deficiency in the same way that an unusual form of
pneumonia (pneumocystis carinii) is a symptom of AIDS. That is, we
theorized that George Bernard Shaw was right when he said,
“the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a symptom
instead of a cause.”
Vitamin D explains the following 14 observations:
1.
Why the flu predictably occurs in the months following the winter
solstice, when vitamin D levels are at their lowest,
2.
Why it disappears in the months following the summer solstice,
3.
Why influenza is more common in the tropics during the rainy season,
4.
Why the cold and rainy weather associated with El Nino Southern
Oscillation (ENSO), which drives people indoors and lowers vitamin D
blood levels, is associated with influenza,
5. Why
the incidence of influenza is inversely correlated with outdoor
temperatures,
6. Why children exposed to sunlight
are less likely to get colds,
7. Why cod liver oil
(which contains vitamin D) reduces the incidence of viral respiratory
infections,
8. Why Russian scientists found that
vitamin D-producing UVB lamps reduced colds and flu in schoolchildren
and factory workers,
9. Why Russian scientists found
that volunteers, deliberately infected with a weakened flu virus -
first in the summer and then again in the winter - show significantly
different clinical courses in the different seasons,
10.
Why the elderly who live in countries with high vitamin D consumption,
like Norway, are less likely to die in the winter,
11.
Why children with vitamin D deficiency and rickets suffer from frequent
respiratory infections,
12. Why an observant
physician (Rehman), who gave high doses of vitamin D to children who
were constantly sick from colds and the flu, found the treated children
were suddenly free from infection,
13. Why the
elderly are so much more likely to die from heart attacks in the winter
rather than in the summer,
14. Why African
Americans, with their low vitamin D blood levels, are more likely to
die from influenza and pneumonia than Whites are.
Although
our paper discusses the possibility that physiological doses of vitamin
D (5,000 units a day) may prevent colds and the flu, and that
physicians might find pharmacological doses of vitamin D (2,000 units
per kilogram of body weight per day for three days) useful in treating
some of the one million people who die in the world every year from
influenza, we remind readers that it is only a theory. Like all
theories, our theory must withstand attempts to be disproved with
dispassionately conducted and well-controlled scientific experiments.
However,
as vitamin D deficiency has repeatedly been associated with many of the
diseases of civilization, we point out that it is not too early for
physicians to aggressively diagnose and adequately treat vitamin D
deficiency. We recommend that enough vitamin D be taken daily to
maintain 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels at levels normally achieved
through summertime sun exposure (50 ng/ml). For many persons, such as
African Americans and the elderly, this will require up to 5,000 units
daily in the winter and less, or none, in the summer, depending on
summertime sun exposure.
By: J. J. Cannell
Four
Thieves Vinegar
According to herbalist Elizabeth Kastner, "During
the height of the plague in France in 1721, it was discovered that the
homes of disease victims were being ransacked. At first, no effort was
made to find the criminals, since all knew they were fools, soon to die
of the plague. As time went on, it became apparent that the thieves
were continuing in their raids... and quite inexplicably, avoiding
falling victim to the disease. Soon, they became highly sought -- not
due to their crimes, but in an effort to learn their secret. When they were finally captured, they refused to speak
until a bargain was offered: remain silent and hang. Divulge the secret
to their resistance to the deadly plague and walk away. It seems that the mother of several of the boys was a
midwife and had a recipe which used plants which were easily
wildcrafted... yet, she knew that this would change immediately if
anyone learned the formula, so she swore her children to secrecy. Her
sons saved their necks and shared the recipe for the disinfectant,
which is still used in France to this day.
Given the simple ingredients of Four Thieves Vinegar and with all the
yammering about smallpox, bioterrorism diseases, and flu vaccine
shortages in the news these days, it seems prudent to me to prepare a
home stock of this historical preventative for dread diseases.
According to Kastner, the traditional recipe for Four Thieves Vinegar makes a lot of sense, medicinally speaking.
You can make your own "Four Thieves Vinegar" by following the simple
recipe below.
Four
Thieves Vinegar Recipe
Use equal parts of the following herbs:
Lavender
Sage
Thyme
Melissa (lemon balm)
Hyssop
Peppermint
A handful of garlic cloves
Blend ingredients in a glass jar and cover completely with organic,
unpasteurized apple cider vinegar, which is available in most health
food stores. Cold infuse (let sit at room temperature in a cool place)
for six weeks and then strain off herbs and garlic.
You can take Four Thieves Vinegar by the teaspoonful, use it as a salad
dressing, or even add a spoonful to your bath water for personal
protection. Four Thieves Vinegar and warmed organic coconut oil make an
excellent salad dressing.You can also use it as a topical spray to
disinfect surfaces - including skin - and/or you can take it as a
tincture. All of the ingredients in Four Thieves Vinegar are either
potent antibacterials or antivirals!