First Nation's clay kills antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/1/e01842-15.full
* Some show antimicrobial or other therapeutic properties, and they have a long history in the treatment of human diseases (5, 6). However, their use is considered to be “naturopathic” medicine, and to date, none have been approved by regulatory agencies for therapeutic applications.
* This deposit differs from other clays such as kaolinite or bentonite. X-ray diffraction shows that KC possesses a low clay mineral content (~24% [wt]), dominated by the presence of biotite (unpublished data). Moreover, as a natural clay deposit, KC has a significant resident microbial community (1,000 to 3,000 taxa), which includes Actinobacteria, which are known to make bioactive small molecules and may contribute to KC activity by the production of antimicrobials (unpublished data).
* More recently, the antibacterial activities and physicochemical characteristics of other therapeutic clay minerals have been investigated in the laboratory (11, 12). Haydel et al. reported on the broad-spectrum in vitro antibacterial activities of a natural iron-rich clay (CsAgO2) that was used to treat patients with Buruli ulcer (12).
* We suggest that the broad-spectrum antibacterial activity of KC may be a valuable option for the treatment of ESKAPE infections, especially in last-resort situations
Looks like they are saying this clay has some interesting physical, microbial, and mineral properties, in other words, it seems like they dont have any idea of why it works but are pretty sure it does.
This is true for a large volume of medical treatments
> The FDA does not actually require you to have a mechanism – that’s a common misconception. The FDA wants to see safety and efficacy. Now, a known mechanism will probably make the assessment of both those factors easier, to be sure, so all things being equal, you’d rather know how your drug works.
They are some of the most prescribed drugs in America. They have a better safety profile than MAOIs, despite that the latter can be more effective in treating depression / anxiety.
[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-yo...
Viagra for example, was originally studied for high blood pressure.
I've also seen a tv program where they visited a pharmacy company's lab that's literally machines mixing random drugs in order to find their next product. The place was the size of a walmart.
The process is extracting active compounds, establishing that they do something (and if so what), finding out whether there are safe dosages, charting what these safe dosages are and looking for a way to mass-produce the compounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action_of_aspirin
"The next stage in clinical evaluation involves detailed clinical studies and toxicity testing."
No, the next step is just toxicity testing -- long before any sort of clinical study.
I'm not sure that's a reasonable comparison - this is a substance with local repute and a history of successful use.
Nobody is claiming that bleach is useful in similar applications.
If you swim in a chlorine pool (diluted bleach) as much as I do, nothing lives on your skin for long. Swimmers don't suffer athlete's foot.
Au contraire!
Sodium hypochlorite is available globally at exceptionally low cost as household bleach in concentrations of 5%-6%.... Sodium hypochlorite has been used as an antiseptic agent in dentistry for more than a century and remains a widely used root canal irrigant at concentrations ranging from 1.0%-5.25%..... The American Dental Association Council on Dental Therapeutics has designated dilute sodium hypochlorite a "mild antiseptics mouth rinse" and suggested its use for direct application to mucous membranes.
By similar application we mean completely injested so that it goes into your digestive system and/or bloodstream and selectively kills "bad" stuff only, even in low concentrations. That's what antibiotics do and that's what's so great about them.
Nobody uses bleach for that. Bleach and alcohol kill everything they touches at high enough concentrations and barely anything if it's too low.
I'm not claiming it is any kind of substitute for antibiotics.
It's worth noting this in this context, because the mechanism the clay kills by is unknown. It maybe more similar to bleach and harmful to everything, or it maybe more targeted.
>> When suspended in water, the clay killed 16 strains of ESKAPE bacteria.
Suspended, not dissolved. This is millions of tiny rocks stirred up in water. If that were injected into anything all manner of negative processes would start, all ending in massive clots/strokes. Perhaps this has some application externally, maybe on burns, but it isn't going to be injected into anything anytime soon.
Moreover, all the therapeutic clays and earths I've heard about, namely bentonite clay, activated charcoal and diatomaceous earth, are suspended in water and drunk.
Eeeehh not necessarily, it just needs to be better than not using it or not being trivially linked to the stuff.
Romans used lead as sweetener both indirectly (making defrutum and sapa in lead pot which they'd found gave them a sweeter taste than brass — because of the lead leeching into the boil) and directly after discovering the extraction of lead acetate from litharge using vinegar. And lead acetate remained in wide use as a sweetener well into the european middle-ages as the only alternate sweetener was honey which wasn't that common. Sugarcane sugar imports from India only started after crusaders brought sugar home from raiding sugar caravans in the middle-east, followed by the triangular trade's massive sugarcane exploitations in the new world — and even then it would remain a luxury in most of europe until the 18th century.
Eg, Lincoln took mercury pills ( http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0717_lincoln... ) , radium cures were the thing in the 1920s ( http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/radium.htm ), and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8701117 I mention an account 1931 account of a man who had been "prescribed tonic pills that contained both elemental phosphorous and strychnine". After taking them for 27 years later, he had an advanced case of phossy jaw from the phosphorous.
Well, mercury is a fairly effective antibacterial agent, it's just that we don't use it much anymore because it's also very toxic to humans. I think it still does have some (limited) medical applications.
This is why I wrote 'elemental mercury'.
I am not aware of an effective medicinal use of elemental mercury, and Lincoln's pills contained that form of mercury.
Felix d'Hérelle "quickly learned that bacteriophages are found wherever bacteria thrive: in sewers, in rivers that catch waste runoff from pipes, and in the stools of convalescent patients."
It's a bit like asking arsonists about fire.
Also "moldy bread was used in China, Greece, Serbia, Egypt and probably other ancient civilizations as treatment for some disease conditions, particularly infected wounds. The observed curative powers may have been due to some raw forms of antibiotics produced by the mold growing on the bread".
http://amrls.cvm.msu.edu/pharmacology/historical-perspective...
Hopefully the people of the Heiltsuk Nation will make more samples available to labs hoping to reproduce this work.
Hopefully some of those labs will, in secure containment facilities, explore how readily the bacteria adapt to develop resistance to this clay. It's important to work out protocols that don't promote rapid global adaptation.
Here: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-25736-5_3
They are probably less susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_shock though.
Though, without actually sterilizing a sample it can be difficult to notice, but lot's of things kill bacteria. They are easy to kill, but hard to kill off.
PS: Spore formation in bacteria is not the principal method of reproduction but simply a method of surviving unfavourable conditions. They are like pinecones which can survive forest fires while pine trees tend to burn really easily.
But we have such a perverse incentive structure - and I'm talking about IP here - that makes it more worthwhile to understand something esoteric and bizarre like a difficult-to-isolate chemical compound, unlikely to have been encountered very often in the history of human evolution, while it's difficult to find motivation to do a simple study like this one.