Vitamin C can kill tuberculosis bacteria – scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York announced today in the US.

Describing their findings as “striking and totally unexpected”, chief researcher of the study William Jacobs Jr, a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College reportedly said that, “Vitamin C has never been shown to kill TB bacilli. The observation that vitamin C can sterilize (laboratory) cultures of drug-susceptible, multi-drug resistant and extreme-drug resistant strains of TB bacilli is striking and totally unexpected”.

However, the researchers also mentioned that this new experiment is yet to be tested in humans. According to them, vitamin C has strong bactericidal activity against TB bacteria which can prove worthwhile to add Vitamin C in the standard treatment of TB.

As per reports, currently about 650,000 people have multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) worldwide while 9 per cent of them have extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB). TB is caused by infection with the bacterium M tuberculosis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), TB made ill around 8.7 million people and claimed around 1.4 million lives only in 2011.

Finding of the study was published in the journal ‘Nature Communications.’