Other Interesting Natural Health Documents

Artemisinin Dr. Sherry Rogers’ T o t a l W e l l n e s s August 2003 ________________________________________________________________________ Artemisinin Kills Parasites and Cancer Cells I’m continually mistyfied by how the media misrepresents medical facts. Malaria, for example, is a public health crisis in the under-developed world. In spite of infusions of money from the Bill Gates Foundation, there’s not a lot of competition among drug companies because these people can’t afford to pay the exorbitant prices for drugs that Americans do. Yet maybe this is a good thing, because as usual there are many cheaper and more natural ways that God has provided for getting rid of this blood parasite. But don’t think that this article has nothing to do with you since you don’t plan on going to Africa and contracting malaria. For learning about how one of Nature’s products kills malaria, has given us a wealth of other uses for our own problems that far exceed our expectations. Malaria is caused by a protozoa that actually burrows inside the red blood cell of its victims, eventually destroying the cell and the person. Over the decades, various nasty drugs have been used but unfortunately Plasmodium falciparum, the bug that causes malaria has learned how to become resistant. But God always comes through with something he has grown that works better than anything man can design. A Chinese herb, Artemisia annua, has been effective for decades against malaria and even against forms resistant to chloroquine. So now drug companies are trying to figure out how to synthetically mimic the effects of this 2000 year-old herb, on the pretense that they won’t have to grow it. But their goal is not quite so noble. They plan on trying to one-up God by producing an expensive patentable drug. The chance of your going to Africa and needing this is quite slim I realize. But there’s a message in this madness, for Artemisinin (the active factor in Artemisia) does not just kill malaria. It is useful for eradicating many different types of protozoa that infect our intestines. And we are continually exposed to more bugs than ever before. When I was in medical school 35 years ago, we used to ask people if they had been out of the United States to determine whether we should look for intestinal parasites. But we no longer have to leave the good old USA to get exotic parasites, because when people come to the U.S.A who cannot speak English and have no work skills, they can always work in a kitchen. We have brought the rest of the world to our doorstep, and because we’re such an affluent society, we are eating out more than ever before. Once the gut becomes silently infected with parasites, it starts to erode the health of the entire individual. For you recall from No More Heartburn that if the gut isn’t healthy, you don’t have a hope of healing anything else. For healing every part of the body depends intimately on the integrity of the immune system and the detoxification system, both of which reside largely in the gut. But even more importantly, Artemisinin has been found to kill cancer cells of a variety of types from leukemia, to colon, lung, breast, fibrosarcomas, and more. And the beauty of it is that it has even killed cancers which were resistant to chemotherapy. The studies were done in some of the most prestigious medical schools in the world like Johns Hopkins. So here we have a God-given botanical that is another tool in killer cancer cells that has been swept under the rug because it’s natural and cannot be patented. Only after its genetic and chemical structure has been duplicated in the laboratory with the addition of a chemical sidearm that makes it into a patentable new drug, will there be enormous marketing. So in the meantime, millions of people will die from malaria and other protozoa infections, because they are too poor to be a profitable market target. And meanwhile millions of Americans will be denied a useful anticancer drug because it cannot be yet synthesized and patented to draw hyper-inflated sums. How Artemisinin Kills Cancer Cells. There are so many ways in which the cancer cell is different from a normal cell. Once a normal cell gets low enough in its protective nutrients and then assaulted by environmental chemicals, the genetic change cranks up to start trans-forming the chemistry into runaway cancer cell. One change is that cancer cells have about 15 times higher levels of transferrin (iron) receptors on their surface as compared with normal cells. Artemisinin, the sesquiterpene lactone isolated from the Chinese herb sweet wormwood (qinghaosu) is reactive with this iron. Combining with and inactivating the iron leads to the death of the cancer cell. As well, when Artemisinin reacts with iron, it causes the generation of free radicals which destroy the cell or parasite. Since cancer cells have much higher influx of iron compared with normal cells, Artemisinin triggers far greater (15 times) free radicals in the cancer cell, leading to its death while leaving the normal cell unaffected. Thus the same mechanism applies for malaria parasites which also contain a high amount of iron. In one case of a 72 year-old male with a long history of chewing and smoking tobacco, there was a walnut size stage II cancer in his larynx making it impossible for him to eat without precipitating blood-stained vomiting and coughing. He was treated with iron (to tank the greedy cancer cell up even more), folic acid and Artemisinin by injection for two weeks, then he was switched to oral tablets. He had high fever for the first week, by two weeks his voice was clear again and he was able to comfortably eat, the lymph nodes in the neck started shrinking and then gradually the tumor shrank to a third of its original size. To use 100 mg Artemisinin (Holley Pharmaceuticals, 1-866-846-5539 or 1-866-8HOLLEY), take 1-2 caps twice a day. Just as artemisinin is active against malaria that has become resistant to many drugs, it is active against cancers that have become resistant to many forms of chemotherapy. In addition, Artemisinin effectively kills human breast cancer cells in culture that are resistant to radiation. This is particularly good news for many types of cancer which have an abysmal track record, like lung cancer. Those cells are notoriously aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy. Treating drug-resistant cancer cells with transferrin increased their intracellular iron levels and made them even more vulnerable to Artemisinin. Regardless of everything possible having been done, fewer than 10 people out of 100 with a lung cancer are still alive at five years. I’ve shown you in the past how studies using certain nutrients have markedly increased survival among these victims. Artemisinin is certainly something I would add to my program. Sadava D, Phillips T, Kane SE, et al, Transferrin overcomes drug resistance to artemisinin in humans small cell lung carcinoma cells, Cancer Letters,2179: 151-1156, 2002. Singh, NP, Lai, H, Selective toxicity of dihydroartemisinin and holotransferrin toward human breast cancer cells, Life Sci 70: 49-56, 2001. Woerdenbag HJ, Moskal TA, Konings AW, et al, Cytotoxicity of artemisinin-related endoperoxides to Ehrlich ascites tumor cells, J Nat Prod 56: 8490856, 1993. Fuhrmans V, Two drug rivals are joining up against malaria, Wall Street Journal, B1, May 19, 2003. Efferth T, Dunstan H., Chitambar CR, et al, The anti-malarial artesunate is also active against cancer, Intern J Oncol 18, 133-139, 2001. Efferth T, Davey M, Davey are, et al, Activity of drugs from traditional Chinese medicine toward sensitive and MDR1 or MRP1-over its pressing multi-drug-resistant human CCRS-CEM leukemia cells, Blood Cells, Molecules, and Diseases 28: 2:160-168, 2002. Singh, NP, Verma KB, Case report of a laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma treated with artesunate, Arch Oncol 10;4:279-280, 2002. Lai H, Singh NP, Selective cancer cell cytotoxicity from exposure to dihydroartemisinin and holotransferrin, Cancer Lett 91:41-46, 1995 Moors JC, Lai H, Chou CK, et al, Oral administration of dihydroartemisinin and ferrous sulfate retarded implanted fibrosarcoma growth in the rat, Cancer Lett 98:83-87, 1995.