41 replies to this topic

[Kalliste]

Ebola is a class 4 hazard like Marburg and Lassa-fever. Any research into it is bound to be extremely costly and unprofitable compared to doing research on things like statins. It would suffer even more from the fact that Turmeric can't be patented unless you have some weird nanoversion of it, like people are trying to figure out these days. 

I doubt Turmeric is the cure. Why do I get sick every now and then from harmless stuff like colds, flu even though I always eat the stuff?

[niner]

Thanks Zen, I just read it. I stopped going to Nature.com when they claimed that 5500 people die every day from Malaria. I did a quick trip to WHO and they claimed that 450k die per year. That's 1.2k deaths per day on average. I got the impression that Nature.com writers often have some ax to grind.

Do you have a reference for that claim? You do realize, I hope, that the only thing written by Nature.com writers are editorials and perhaps comments on articles? The papers themselves are written by scientists who have no connection to the journal.
 

 

A 5 hour pre-treatment of PBMCs isolated from healthy donors with curcumin (10 µM or 20 µM) also inhibited the ability of IFN-α and IFN-γ to phosphorylate STAT1 or STAT3 (Figure 3A). Curcumin pre-treatments also led to a striking inhibition of IL-2-induced STAT5 phosphorylation in PBMCs (Figure 3B). These data suggested the inhibitory effects of curcumin were broad and not specific to the interferons.

 

This is the flaw in your logic. You can't get a 20 or even 10 uM concentration of curcumin in humans from eating turmeric, and certainly not for 5 hours. You probably couldn't hit those concentrations even with a sophisticated (and expensive) formulation of curcumin. The evidence that you need is a demonstration of an in vivo anti-viral effect from turmeric, in a mammal.  You can get all kinds of things to happen in a test tube that won't work in a human.

[YOLF]

Nobody eat Turmeric like me, yet I still get the occasional cold and runny stomach. I eat both powder and fresh roots every day. Heated, with oliveoil, without any dairy, with pepper, ginger and currypowder. Do you seriously think it will deal with Ebola? I bet you stumbled over some in vitro paper where they drenched a few Ebola guys with a million times as much Turmeric as can be achieved in vivo even with injections. You better have good sources or I will doubt you.

 

Edited for polity.

From personal experience eating Malaysian curry (one of my favorite foods, it's the kind purchased at Chinese restaurants), I can say that it will certainly raise one's immune system for exactly one day and no more. I suppose if I were working out frequently the results might be a little different or even continuous, I will have to test it out some day. I think many of the curry ingredients need to be better characterized, but they do have some very short term benefits when not used daily or only when taken the first day of a cold to hopefully shorten it.

[RorschachRev]

Niner, I agree with your logic and it would require evidence to the contrary. I would need a few test cases where turmeric was an effective anti-viral despite limited bio-availability. 

1. My mother had cat scratch fever after exposure to a wild cat and receiving multiple lacerations on her right arm. The hospital inspected the wound and said that there was nothing they could do. They informed her she would be very sick for 2-3 weeks but she would survive. She ingested 1/2 teaspoon of food grade turmeric in water three times in 8 hours. After approximately 12 hours she claimed to be improving. The next morning, approximately 18 hours after her first dose and 22 hours after injury, she said she was fine and went to work.
2. I cured a cat through ingested turmeric only that had been leaking pus from its neck after a fight with another animal and crawled away to die. I had climbed in after it and offered it turmeric, which it ate directly from a lid.
3. I treated 2 abscessed teeth with infections
4. Removes enough toxins to cure acne for 3 people on an oral dose of 1 capsule per day, which is approximately 1/6 teaspoon.
5. Prevented or treated various illnesses and flu in myself despite a compromised immune system at least 10 times over 17 years. I have "stayed ill" for a duration of over 24 hours only once after taking turmeric, and that turmeric was from a spice rack in a super market.

I was not able to treat an abscessed tooth where the infection had spread through the bone marrow, causing massive swelling on that side of the face with only 1 treatment of 1/2 teaspoon.

 

Here is a somewhat fair summary of other research, released in full: http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC3535097/

 

Niner, several journals I read last night talked about absorption issues of curcumin. Nanoparticles were one solution, but it limited the efficacy to a subset of viral infections. Other solutions I read about last night to increase bioavailability: including a percentage of original turmeric, heating the curcumin prior to administration, oil infusions (oil soluble), extract injection (Oppenheimer), piperine and a series of other proposals in the linked article. (Search for bioavailability.) Ayurveda recipes include ginger to increase absorption. Since Sierra Leone is the #11 producer of citrus worldwide, I was going to suggest using citrus peels.

 

Comicalstorm: you seem to have made every effort to become ill on turmeric resistant organisms. Longer chain DNA viruses are one example. Many bacteria are another case. Your intestinal flora are also probably very weakened. However you are probably not going to get Alzheimer’s disease http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC3744901/

 

 

[RorschachRev]

 

Thanks Zen, I just read it. I stopped going to Nature.com when they claimed that 5500 people die every day from Malaria. I did a quick trip to WHO and they claimed that 450k die per year. That's 1.2k deaths per day on average. I got the impression that Nature.com writers often have some ax to grind.

Do you have a reference for that claim? You do realize, I hope, that the only thing written by Nature.com writers are editorials and perhaps comments on articles? The papers themselves are written by scientists who have no connection to the journal.

 

 

http://www.nature.co...-threat-1.15640 Their website says 3200 / day, WHO says 1200 /day. I misquoted the number, but was accurate in their misreporting.

[RorschachRev]

I should point out that the editors of a magazine, be it Time magazine or Nature, have a responsibility to verify facts. "The New Republic" got hit over this one.  http://en.wikipedia....i/Stephen_Glass

[Kalliste]

I think you are doing pseudoscience. It's a shame because you have good intentions. Please donate to SENS or GiveWell instead of wasting money on this turmeric boondoggle.

[RorschachRev]

I think you are a rude troll who shouldn't be using the F word at me

[niner]

I think you are a rude troll who shouldn't be using the F word at me

Who used the F word? Are you seeing things that I'm not?

[Kalliste]

I think you are a rude troll who shouldn't be using the F word at me

 

It was careless of me to use rude language, but not directed at you, just a signal of general confusion from me. I did not now the forum had a cuss-policy. I apologize for that. I will retract from this discussion now.

Best of luck with this herbal Eboladventure

Edited by Cosmicalstorm, 09 October 2014 - 05:42 AM.

[PhysiologicOxygen]

Hey everyone it seems this thread took off after I posted it. It didn't receive much play at first. I have done extensive reading on Ebola and I have seen nothing mentioned with regards to tumeric. However there is information that the disregulation of the coagulation cascade (which along with dehydration causes the death from ebola) is caused by the selenorotein content in the genome of ebola. I have outlined this information here: http://ctcantina.com...=18404#pid18404

 

In summary:

Selenium has an anticlotting effect, whereas selenium deficiency has a proclotting or thrombotic effect. It is also well documented that extreme dietary selenium deficiency, which is almost never seen in humans, has been associated with hemorrhagic effects in animals.
Thus, the possibility that viral selenoprotein synthesis might contribute to hemorrhagic symptoms merits further consideration. Computational genomic analysis of certain hemorrhagic fever viruses reveals the presence of potential protein coding regions (PPCRs) containing large numbers of in-frame UGA codons, particularly in the -1 reading frame. In some cases, these clusterings of UGA codons are very unlikely to have arisen by chance, suggesting that these UGAs may have some function other than being a stop codon, such as encoding selenocysteine.
For this to be possible, a downstream selenocysteine insertion element (SECIS) is required. Ebola Zaire, the most notorious hemorrhagic fever virus, has a PCR with 17 UGA codons, and several potential SECIS elements can be identified in the viral genome. One potential viral selenoprotein may contain up to 16 selenium atoms per molecule. Biosynthesis of this protein could impose an unprecedented selenium demand on the host, potentially, leading to severe lipid peroxidation and cell membrane destruction, and contributing to hemorrhagic symptoms. Alternatively, even in the absence of programmed selenoprotein synthesis, it is possible that random slippage errors would lead to increased encounters with UGA codons in overlapping reading frames, and thus potentially to nonspecific depletion of SeC in the host.
http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/9152513

[PhysiologicOxygen]

Theoretical Evidence that the Ebola Virus Zaire Strain May Be Selenium-Dependent: A Factor in Pathogenesis and Viral Outbreaks?

 

Discuss here please and this thread won't go off topic:

http://ctcantina.com...=18402#pid18402