3 January

Final instalment on whooping cough. This is a table from a pretty famous scientific paper published in 1937. It's a small sample of treatments the Canadian medical researchers concerned (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1562195/pdf/canmedaj00527-0084.pdf) had tried on people with whooping cough. As you can see in every case, giving the patients Vitamin C cleared up the whooping cough in spectacularly quick time. They suggested the Vitamin C was acting to remove the toxins the Pertussis bacteria had deposited in a person's airways, and they followed this up with further studies which showed the same pattern. What they did which then decades of antibiotic enthusiasm forgot was to target the toxic byproducts of the bacteria, rather than just the bacteria itself. (Again antibiotics possibly encouraged a certain laziness in medical understanding of microbes - microbes live in communities, and often have byproducts that contribute to the disease as well.) They believed these byproducts were the reason people coughed for 100 days with whooping cough, long after the bacteria itself should be dead - the body was trying to clear the toxins, but this was very hard work and thus the extreme coughing. As you can see in some cases the coughing stopped in as little as 5 days, after patients were given relatively small amounts of vitamin C. I tried this myself. My cough felt amazingly better on the very first day, which surprised me, in a very happy way. And it's been getting better every day since, so much that sometimes I forget the cough is even there. I've been doing this only about 4 days. So if you have whooping cough or know somebody who has, I'd highly recommend trying some vitamin C. It won't hurt people, so it's a very safe experiment to try. Say maybe 500mg-1000mg a day, or a bit less for children (say 250mg). You can see this is the sort of amounts the Canadian researchers tried in 1937. This is the standard vitamin C tablet sizes you can buy, which makes it easy. There's a lot of research that says Vitamin C can be taken in huge doses without ill effect (tens or even hundreds of grams a day), but I think easiest to start with these lower doses. Too much can give you the runs, at which point you just cut back the dose, it's not harmful. You need to take enough to saturate the amount in your system, which can be a little trial and error (saturation is when you start to get the runs), but it's worth just trying the amounts above to start. If it's not having an effect, try a bit more vitamin C, and if you get the runs, cut it back a bit. There is medical research looking much harder at vitamin C now, and that it may in fact play a critical role in dealing with a range of bacterial and viral illnesses, including pneumonia. Medicine has had no real success with viral disease in particular, and there's a suggestion that vitamin C might be a powerful treatment for a whole range of viral illnesses. And maybe even more. I should add as a footnote that anti-vaxxers also discovered this paper and use it as an argument against vaccination, for whooping cough at least. That debate is a complicated one and not one for here, but I don't think vaccination is properly understood by either those for or against it, so there's a long way to go to get consensus there. Vaccination against whooping cough definitely reduced the rate of the disease pretty strongly at first, although as in the previous paper I posted, it's now fighting back and the vaccines are struggling. So the question is still an open one. I am vaccinated and will continue to get boosters as well, so it's not either/or for me. And for babies the vaccination has without question saved thousands of lives. But vaccination may not stop you getting the cough, and vitamin C may be the best friend you've ever had if that happens.