Scientists have announced Vitamin C appears key to fighting tuberculosis.
A research team from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York says it made the accidental discovery while researching how TB bacteria grew resistant to the drug isoniazid.
The researchers combined isoniazid and another chemical, cysteine, expecting the TB bacteria to develop a drug resistance to the mix.
Instead, the process yield a "totally unexpected" result that "ended up killing off the culture," according to the study's senior author William Jacobs.
The team then swapped out the cysteine with a similar agent, Vitamin C, which also killed the bacteria --- with the isoniazid, but also by itself.
"I was in disbelief," said Jacobs, whose study findings were published in the journal Nature Communications. "Vitamin C kills tuberculosis."
The team next tested the vitamin on strains of TB known to be drug-resistant and got the same lethal results.
The TB bacteria never developed resistance to Vitamin C in lab tests, prompting Jacobs to announce Vitamin C is "almost like the dream drug."
Jacobs emphasized the vitamin's effect on TB has so far only been tested in a lab environment and "we don't know if it will work in humans" or even how much of the vitamin one would need to take for it to ward off TB bacteria. "Before this study we wouldn't have even thought about trying this study in humans."
Disease experts in March warned of a "very real" risk of an untreatable TB strain emerging as more and more people develop drug resistance and in 2011there were an estimated 12 million TB cases worldwide, with at least 630,000 instances in which patients didn't respond to what have long been considered the strongest anti-TB drugs around, isoniazid and rifampin.
Tuberculosis was declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization 20 years ago and remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases know, in spite of a 41 percent decrease in related death rate from 1990 to 2011, the last year during which 8.7 million people fell ill with TB and 1.4 million died..
It's been found over 95 percent of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, and ranks as the leading killer of people with HIV.
An airborne disease that attacks the lungs, tuberculosis is usually treatable with a six-month regimen of antibiotics.