In April 2005, a virulent strain of influenza hit a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital for men that's midway between San Francisco and Los
Angeles. John J. Cannell, a psychiatrist there, observed with increasing curiosity as one infected ward after another was quarantined to limit the out-
break Although 10 percent of the facility's 1,200 patients ultimately developed the flu's fever and debilitating muscle aches, none did in the ward that he supervised.

“first the Ward below mine was quarantined, then the award on my right, left and across the hall” Cannell recalls.  However although the 32 men on his ward at Atascedro (Calif) State Hospital had mingled with patients from infected wards before the quarantine, none developed the illness Cannell’s ward was the only heavily exposed Ward left uninfected.

Was it by mere chance, Cannell wondered, that is patients dodged the sickness?

A few months later, Cannell ran acrossa possible answer in the scientific literature.  In a July 2005 in FASEB  Journal Adrian F.  Gombart of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and his colleagues reported that vitamin D boosted production in white blood cells on one of the antimicrobial compounds that defend the body against germs.

Immediately Cannell says, the proverbial lightbulb went on in his head: maybe the high dose of vitamin D that he has been prescribing to virtually all the men on his ward had boosted their natural Arsenal of the antimicrobial, called cathelicidin, and protected them from flu.  Cannell have been administering the vitamin D because his patients, like many other people in the industrial world had shown a deficiency.

The FASER Journal article also triggered Cannell’s recollection that children with rickets, a hallmark of vitamin D deficiency, tend to experience more infections than do kids without bone disease. He shared his flu data list some well-known vitamin D researchers,and they urged him to investigate  further.

On the faces of more than 100 articles that he had collected, Cannell and seven other researchers now propose that vitamin D deficiency may undermine a vulnerability to infections by microbes that cathelicidin targets.  This includes bacteria, viruses, and fungi

The group notes in a report available online for an upcoming Epidemiology and Infection.

This is only a hypothesis,” but a credible is one” that deserves testing, says immunologist Michael Zasloff of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

By hiding the hypothesis are recent studies that link vitamin D intake to revved-up cathelicidin production.  These investigations it’s going to an efficient fighting role for vitamin D, which is produced in  skin exposed to sunlight but is present in few foods.

A study published earlier this year that investigated the relationship between vitamin D and susceptibility to tuberculosis Also bolsters the idea proposed by Cannell’s team.  Scientists have already planned a handful of clinical trials to evaluate the antimicrobial benefits of vitamin D supplementation.

Zasloff Argues that if studies support the hypothesis, “we can imagine one day treating infections got that giving somebody a drug, but by giving them safe and simple substance-like a vitamin

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