Re: Sarah Vaughter's Lufenuron - DO NOT SUPPORT this woman!

The OP is angry about my "rudeness" because I deleted his posting because it violated our simple, sensible rules for posting and the OP kept attacking my integrity in a rude manner. I am indeed "rude" - I have Asperger's and do not suffer fools gladly. When lives are at stake, bullshit should be left at the door. The OP pasted my long article from my site here verbatim, even though this constitutes a breach of Copyright. But never mind, because my reply makes a good case in my favor. I reproduce it again here and let the reader decide:

1. The company name "Anti aging systems" does not inspire confidence. There simply are no "anti-aging systems" apart from not doing too much free radical damage to the body by refraining from smoking and not eating too much, and not eating too much bad "food". (Note: This was before the discovery of C60 in olive oil, but this is also an antioxidant.) I would expect a company with such a name to sell expensive pseudoscientific products to people impressed by a scientific sounding sales pitch.

2. When looking at their "affiliates" page, I see that the company is most ruthlessly commercial, structered like a multi-level marketing company focussing on profit, profit, profit. When I look at the rest of their pages, I see a company focussing on sales, sales, sales. Nowhere do I see references to solid science.

3. I was not impressed by the heavily rehearsed and edited "interview" on their site with Richard Stead. He was clearly "acting", going through a script. Note how the video has been produced by a very professional advertizing agency. It is not an interview by journalists or fellow scientists. So it's just part of an expensive PR campaign. I expect to be more links appearing soon on forums such as these ;-)

4. In the interview and on the website they claim "we could kill every single one of a wide varity of dangerous pathogens in the laboratory" but nowhere they give any reference to such laboratory studies, peer-reviewed work etc. in vivo. I can kill the AIDS virus in a test tube with a little household chlorine, but it would be a scam to start selling weak solutions of bleach to cure HIV infection. This won't work for a variety of reasons that unfortunately elude the average customer. Their claims are irresponsibly deceptive.

So these are just some general impressions, glancing at the site.

Their introduction is 100% correct. Yes, Antibiotics are misused and over-used. Yes, bacterial infections are an increasingly big problem. Yes, Antibiotic resistance is increasingly common.
Whenever snake oil is being peddled, the prospective customer is first carefully spun into a web of truths, gradually half-truths and finally lies. It is the basic principle of disinformation.
You start with a Dr. of one-or-the-other telling known truths, and you end up paying good hard cash for something that doesn't have the slightest effect whatsoever - which could have been logically reasoned so before the purchase.

Let's investigate the product they are selling, Oxythiocyanate. A Nigerian professor claims to have invented it and he wants to try it against AIDS:

http://www.owndoc.com/pdf/ArtherObel.pdf


Looks interesting so far.

When we go back to the company selling the Thiocyanate, they say that the human body produces 50 to 100 mg Thiocyanate per day and that they recommend a daily dose of 25 mg, "to stay on the safe side".

This immediately should ring all alarm bells. Even if Oxythiocyanate would be killing all kinds of pathogens in vitro (in a Petri dish in the lab), and their substance is indeed Oxythiocyanate, there is no reason to believe that it will work in vivo at a dose significantly lower than what the body produces by itself. In fact it would be irrational to believe that if your body can't get rid of an infection with 100 mg of Oxythiocyanate per day, that it will eradicate an infection with 125 mg of Oxythiocyanate per day. An increase of orders of magnitude would be required even in theory, that is when the substance would work as well in vivo as in vitro (it never does, due to the myriads of elimination mechanisms and biochemical interactions, stomach acid, sequestering niches etc).

Let's see what the early adopters at Curezone have to say about Oxythiocyanate:

"No improvement whatsoever":

//www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=1307551#i


It's in fact not "Thiocyanate" or "Oxythiocyanate" but "Hypothiocyanite" that's easily found to be credited with antimicrobial efficacy, but only in the respiratory tract (= on top of the mucous membranes, not inside the body) and the compound is short-lived (of course there's always the "brilliant scientist (Richard Stead)" who discovered an -unproven- secret/(uselessly)patented miracle method to make the compound "last longer" otherwise a simple Wikipedia search would unveil that the compound is useless in vivo):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothiocyanite


I conclude that some (Oxy/Hypo)Thiocyanates/cyanites have antibacterial/antifungal/antiviral efficacy but certainly not in the small dosages sold to the "anti-aging" crowd.

Usually, even when you actually get what is supposed to work in vitro, such compounds either are immediately neutralized or malabsorbed when taken orally or, when given intravenously, their dosage would (nearly) kill the patient when given intravenously. If it would work at all, intravenously.
But it would be interesting to read some actual animal research, for example. But in any case, those who sell it online are dishonest, insinuating that you're buying a miracle cure for all infections. I don't think it's particularly useful to combat infections in the form it is sold today.

Let me know if you find some research of this compound in vivo, I'd appreciate a link to something published in a reputable journal.