Common soap kills AIDS, herpes, human wart viruses
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - A common detergent found in shampoo and
toothpaste can kill not only the AIDS virus but the viruses that cause cervical cancer and herpes infection, researchers said on Friday.
The compound, sodium dodecyl sulfate or SDS, can also kill the bacteria that cause chlamydia, the most commonly sexually transmitted disease, said Mary K. Howett and colleagues at Penn State University medical center in Hershey, Pa.
While the researchers are trying to play down premature excitement about the compound, it is the first to work against not only the HIV virus that causes AIDS, herpes and chlamydia, but also the human wart virus blamed for cervical cancer.
If the compound could be developed into a product that women could use to protect themselves from these sexually transmitted diseases, millions could escape lingering deaths, the researchers said.
Toothpaste in particular contains high levels of SDS, but Howett said women seeking to protect themselves from disease should not try to use toothpaste or shampoo.
''Products on the market now are not formulated for the genital tract, won't stay in the genital tract,'' she said.
''This has to be formulated into a gel or a cream,'' added Dr. Penny Hitchcock of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose office helped fund the study. ''It would be six to 12 months before it could be tested in women.''
Experts say a microbicide would be the answer for people whose partners will not use condoms, and is vital for women in developing countries especially.
''For the third world, this is the answer because they are not going to get retrovirus combination therapy (the drugs that keep AIDS at bay) and they are not going to get a vaccine for a long time,'' Howett said in a telephone interview.
Hitchcock said it was especially important that SDS could kill the wart virus, known as human papilloma virus or HPV.
HPV is blamed for virtually all cases of cervical cancer, which kills 250,000 women globally every year.
''HPV is so prevalent that in one study we did with the University of Washington, in the first year of sexual activity, one out of four women became infected with HPV,'' Hitchcock said in a telephone interview.
The women had, on average, only 1.2 sexual partners, which means most of them had only had sex with one man -- yet they became infected with an incurable virus.
Women with HPV infection often have abnormal Pap smears -- the check used to detect developing cervical cancer. If caught by a Pap smear cervical cancer is one of the most treatable cancers, but Hitchcock said many women in developing countries do not get Pap smears.
She estimated that since the start of the AIDS epidemic, five million women have died of cervical cancer. Fourteen million people have died of AIDS.
It is also important that the compound works against herpes, she said. ''We now estimate about 60 million Americans have genital herpes,'' Hitchcock said.
''There's been a 30 percent increase since the start of the AIDS epidemic, and that increasingly has been in adolescents, particularly white adolescent males. I don't want to diminish the HIV but these other two viruses are really important.''
Writing in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Howett, who worked with teams at several other universities including the University of North Carolina, said SDS killed the three viruses and the chlamydia bacteria, did not irritate the vaginas of rabbits and in general seemed non-toxic to animals.
It is less toxic, she said, than nonoxynol-9, a widely used spermicide that can also kill viruses in test tubes but which has not been proved to kill HIV when used in animals. And nonoxynol-9 does not touch HPV.
She said SDS is widely used in laboratories to pull apart viruses that scientists want to study. ''That's what made us think about it,'' she said. |
