|
|
 |
Humble lemon 'could protect against HIV/AIDS'
Melanie Peters. 06 October 2002. Republished courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
|
Lemon juice has amazing powers to prevent HIV/AIDS and as a contraceptive to kill sperm in 30 seconds, according to an Australian academic visiting Cape Town.
He is Robert Short and he will deliver a controversial paper on the supposedly miraculous effects of lemon juice at the 9th International Society of Spermatology World Congress in the city this week.
Short, a professorial fellow in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Royal Women's Hospital at the University of Melbourne, said: "We have studied the effects of 10 percent lemon juice on HIV/AIDS in culture, and it kills the virus very quickly. Similarly, a final concentration of 20 percent lemon juice in a fresh human ejaculate irreversibly immobilises 100 percent of spermatozoa in less than 30 seconds.
"Thus it would be necessary to use only about 1ml of lemon juice in the vagina to inactivate HIV/AIDS and sperm. One lemon may contain 50ml of juice. Neat lemon juice applied to the vagina, or the penis and foreskin is not in any way painful to the user if no lesions are present."
Short said it was well known that HIV/AIDS was killed by acids and lemon juice was an acid.
He asks: "Could a sponge, soaked in diluted lemon juice or a very thin slice of lemon, be used by women pre-coitally as a protection against both HIV/AIDS infection and pregnancy?"
He said the spermicidal and virucidal effect of the juice could not be patented or controlled by pharmaceutical companies.
"Lemon juice might also be very useful for post-coital washing of the penis, particularly the foreskin, to protect men from HIV/AIDS infection. If lemons are in short supply, lime juice would be a good alternative."
He said there was historical evidence to show that lemon juice in the vagina was once widely used as a contraceptive in Mediterranean regions. Norman Hines, author of The Medical History of Contraception, stated that "the practice of some Constantinople women of soaking a sponge in diluted lemon juice and using it as a vaginal tampon is theoretically not surpassed in reliability by any modern clinical contraceptive".
Short said conventional western-style safety and efficacy testing of lemon juice would be difficult.
It would involve testing couples in which one partner was HIV-positive and the other not. Since condoms were advocated for all acts of sexual intercourse, the test would require large numbers of volunteers and several years to demonstrate the effects of lemon juice when condoms were not used.
"Surely it is unethical to withhold this information about the spermicidal and virucidal effects of lemon juice pending such a trial, while millions more people become infected with HIV/AIDS? We need to find alternative ways of evaluating the safety, efficacy and acceptability of this old yet new spermicide and virucide."
He said the university was doing ongoing research on primates to see if repeated vaginal use of lemon juice damaged the vagina. They also needed to establish that lemon juice would kill all the HIV in the semen of HIV-positive men. |
| Was this article helpful to you? |
 ?62%???? ?38%
|
|
Back
|
|
|
|
