Posted on 03/28/2014 4:57:00 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
Some people think of tobacco as a drug, whereas others think of it as a therapy — or both. But for the most part, it's hard to find people who think of the tobacco plant in terms of its medical applications. Qiang Chen, an infectious disease researcher at Arizona State University, is one such person. His team of scientists conducted an experiment, published today in PLOS ONE, that demonstrates how a drug produced in tobacco plants can be used to prevent death in mice infected with a lethal dose of West Nile virus. The study represents an important first step in the development of a treatment for the mosquito-borne disease that has killed 400 people in the US within the last two years.
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
Indians used to use tobacco as an antiseptic dressing for wounds.
Oh, geez. You’ve found your purpose in life?
Smoking was said to help malaria sufferers.
With the proper nutrients, sunlight & temperature, duckweed will double every 24 hours.
Very productive!
I know one thing. When wet, it’s excellent for bee/wasp stings. I keep it in our first aid kit. Handed down in our fam from Cherokee GGMother.
Did she use raw potato to draw out deeply imbedded splinters?
My granny kept some cigarettes for the same purpose. Wasp and bee stings.
No, but it was known in my fam to draw out deep boils and ‘bone bruises’.
My first summer job as a teen was working in the tobacco fields and barns of family and neighbors. I know that nicotine will absorb through wet clothing and into your skin. Getting a heavy dose of it pulling tobacco in the morning while the dew is still heavy will make the world spin out from under your feet, quite ill, akin to motion sickness. Smokers didn’t experience this though, only nonsmokers did.
When I smoked on an off years ago it would make me dizzy.
It’s mildly psychoactive and does somehow affect the inner ear.
We dusted snuff along the cows’ spines to keep ectoparasites away.
Worked great.
/johnny
I take it you mean used cigarette butts.
Careful.
You might get grotesque pictures hurled toward you for disagreeing in any way.
I doubt they’d be handling it enough to experience anything like what I described, that came from working hours getting dew-soaked, from gray pre-dawn to midmorning trying to beat the heat and get the ripe yellowing bottom leaves pulled and into the barn before the sun burned them up. Carrying two shotguns on the tractor for copperheads and rattlers, and as many frozen milkjugs for ice water as they could stack on the back too, lol. Hard work. But honest. Food never tasted so good, lunch outside after all that. Cold foods, tomato sandwiches, fried chicken that had been allowed to cool, cucumber salad with vinegar, onion and black pepper. Then, onto the shade of the barns to string it all and put it up.
For those who might someday need to know . . . if you’re ever really dangerously whacked out on psychedelics, tobacco will bring you back. Just saying.
There are many unhealthy habits in the world. None have been subject to the sustained campaign that tobacco has. The war on tobacco is, I think, more symptomatic of a disdain for those who have grown it than anything else. The health effects of sustained, excessive use are not pretty, but neither are those from any number of other substances that have been met with nowhere near the level of opprobrium. Alcohol, first and foremost. Then, we have the same supposedly health-conscious individuals turning around and advocating the legalization of marijuana. Marijuana smoke is somehow beneficial to the lungs, I take it? The whole thing is irrational and weird, imho. The party profiting by far and away the most from the sale of a pack of cigarettes would be government. Therein lies the reason it has not been made illegal. “Big Tobacco” is dwarfed by their cut.
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