Matthew Beasley
Blog#8
Tobacco cures diseases
For longer than I have been
alive, governments have provided facts about the dangers of tobacco
use. This recent trial experiment is showing that tobacco in its raw
form may have potentially great health benefits for certain diseases.
Hopefully we all know that smoking cigarettes can cause lung cancer,
but this research claims that a bi-product in young tobacco leaves
called MAB's, may be a very cost effective way of eliminating the
West Nile virus. These MAB proteins, they claim are good at
targeting and eliminating neurological diseases and tobacco leaves
seem to be a cheap way of obtaining large quantities of the protein.
This is a drastic reduction in the current animal based procurement
method which costs around $1 billion dollars per each therapeutic
candidate. In the clinical trials on mice, it was found that these
tobacco based proteins were capable of neutralizing the West Nile
virus even when the virus had been present for days and already had
spread to the brain.
This is potentially very
big news, because there is no current cure or treatment for the West
Nile Virus that has spread throughout the globe. This is a two fold
treatment in that it can neutralize a already contracted virus and
also protect mice from even contracting West Nile. The research
showed that over 90% of the mice that were tested, were protected
from this lethal infection. The next step for this tobacco based
research is to develop better delivery methods to the brain and also
to implement human based trials. With the risks of smoking
cigarettes killing the image of tobacco, this information could be
the face lift that tobacco has long needed. My hope would be that
people would still stop smoking, but this could be a new revenue
stream for the growers that depend on this cash crop for the survival
of their families throughout the globe.
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