Thanks for an excellent posting.
On the other hand, it is well known that there is a seasonality to influenza that correlates well with the seasonal drop in vitamin D or 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) levels.2 Levels of 25(OH)D are quite low in nursing home residents, and supplementation with 2000 IU of vitamin D can bring levels to normal safely in most patients.”
This is so obvious re how the flus go on rampages in the winter time.
Why, our vitamin D levels drop as we go indoors and don’t get our daily, low cost Vitamin D from the sun.
Going predominately indoors usually means being in closer contact with other vectors...so that is another reason why infection rates goe up.
The sun is the best way to get Vit D (IMO), but it’s just too cold right now to be outside. My 97 year old dad needs D - on “warm” days he sits outside against the house, but since he’s on blood thinners, he stays pretty bundled up, which defeats the purpose. Plus, his age works against him since as people age they lose some of their ability to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight. Vitamin D also needs to be activated in the kidney before it can be used by the body and this function also decreases with age. During the late fall/winter/early spring is when his Vit D levels especially need to be higher as that is ‘flu’ season around here. He’s on a ‘minimum’ level of D ... needs more. If he gets sick, I have some 5,000 IU & will give him a “hammer”!!
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One more thing about Vit D .... I suffer from chronic urticaria (hives). I’m finding a lot of it is food & mold just ‘slays’ me, but something that works to keep the outbreaks to a minimum is Vit D!! While scrounging around online, I found this study & applied it to myself with REALLY good results (I take only D3 at 5K IU/day, no other allergy meds). Just an FYI - using (successfully!) a mostly carnivore diet as an ‘elimination’ diet to also deal with hives, insulin resistance, etc. but that’s a whole ‘nother patch of weeds that I’ll stay out of for now:
Excerpt:
The latest I’ve seen on treatment for chronic hives comes from the University of Nebraska Medical Center where researchers found that adding vitamin D3 supplements to a combination of allergy medications (one prescription and two over-the-counter drugs) could provide relief for patients who had experienced severe chronic hives for five to 20 years. Some had been treated medically and some had not. Standard therapy for chronic hives is to control symptoms with antihistamines and other allergy medications. Many of these are expensive, and some have significant side effects, the team leader noted.
For the study, half of the 38 patients participating took 600 IUs of vitamin D3 daily while the other half took 4,000 IUs. The researchers reported that after just one week, the severity of symptoms decreased by 33 percent for both groups of patients. However, at the end of three months, those taking 4,000 IUs of vitamin D3 had a further 40 percent decrease in severity of their hives, while after the first week, no further improvement occurred in the patients taking the lower dose.
The researchers termed the study results “a significant improvement,” and noted that the higher dose of readily available vitamin D3 could be considered a safe and potentially beneficial therapy. They wrote that those patients taking the higher dose of D3 also had less severe hives during the study – they didn’t have as many hives, and reported a decrease in the number of days a week they had outbreaks.
Link where study is mentioned:
https://www.drweil.com/health-wellness/body-mind-spirit/allergy-asthma/had-it-with-hives/
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Lastly, I feel I should draw attention to this because several folks we know have died of SEPSIS over the last couple of years ... it looks like Vit C plus steroids will get people over it in many cases .... here’s the link:
Has sepsis met its match?
New treatment may save millions around the world
https://www.evms.edu/about_evms/administrative_offices/marketing_communications/publications/issue_9_4/has-sepsis-met-its-match.php
“Dr. Marik has developed a brilliant and elegantly simple hypothesis in the treatment of sepsis,” says Richard Homan, MD, President and Provost of EVMS and Dean of the School of Medicine. “The implications of the findings are profound and, if replicated, may transform the treatment of sepsis worldwide.”
As a critical-care physician and head of the general intensive care unit (GICU) at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Dr. Marik used to be locked in a life-and-death struggle with sepsis. Despite his efforts, one to two people under his care died each week from the disease. That all changed unexpectedly Jan. 5, 2016.
The breakthrough came as Dr. Marik struggled to save a woman dying from overwhelming sepsis. He had recently read about vitamin C as a potential treatment for sepsis, and he recalled that steroids, a common treatment for sepsis, might work well in concert with the vitamin C.
Aware that both were safe and would not harm the patient, he gave her the vitamin C and steroid combination ntravenously.
Within hours, his patient was recovering. Two days later she was well enough to leave the ICU.
Dr. Marik and his colleagues were astonished. “We said,‘What just happened?’”
In the following days they used the combination therapy on two more patients seemingly destined to die of sepsis. Twice more the patients recovered. Dr. Marik and his team quickly adopted the combination therapy as standard practice.
Despite the continued successes, Dr. Marik found that many colleagues were skeptical. For one thing, pharmaceutical companies have conducted more than 100 clinical trials and spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 25 years in an unsuccessful search for a sepsis treatment.
And then there is vitamin C. It has been purported as a cure or treatment for a wide range of conditions — with little scientific evidence of its effectiveness.
To strengthen his case and to allay his own apprehensions that this was too good to be true, Dr. Marik worked with colleagues to study the interaction in a lab setting. Two separate biological tests proved that vitamin C and steroids were effective against sepsis — but only when used together.
A year after Dr. Marik’s chance discovery, sepsis has become a controllable infection in his ICU. Other hospitals and ICUs are beginning to adopt the combination treatment.
Dr. Marik’s findings are published in CHEST, the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
“We haven’t seen a patient die of sepsis since we began using the combination therapy a year ago,” Dr. Marik said one year to the day after treating the first patient. “We have completely changed the natural history of sepsis.”
So..... my question is -— Flu-rate of S.Westeners VS NorEasters…..!? Or would preventive treatment require much
higher “doses” of Vit.D ??
Always be careful with 'correlation' as it doesn't always equate to causation.
One thing that many forget is that the lymphatic system doesn't have a pump, like the heart does for blood, and instead requires movement from the body and muscles to function. If there is less activity in colder (i.e., winter months) than the body's systems isn't functioning as well as intended. It's a matter of getting all the right pieces into play.