Scurvy, a disease known to mankind hundreds of years ago, was called incurable and had a high mortality rate at the time due to the previous lack of understanding by mankind as to why it occurred.
It wasn't until 1911 that humans determined it was due to a vitamin C deficiency.
In the 18th century, scurvy was common among sailors on ocean voyages (who were far from land and lacked access to fresh fruits and vegetables); it was also prevalent among army soldiers trapped in wars for long periods of time, communities chronically deprived of food, besieged cities, prison inmates, and labor camps.
For example, there were large numbers of cases of scurvy among gold miners in California 140 years ago and in Alaska 90 years ago.
The symptoms of scurvy begin with weakness of the limbs, depression, irritability, fatigue in all work, and redness of the skin.
The patient feels muscle pain and depression.
Then his face swells, his gums bleed, his teeth fall out, and his breath smells bad.
There is a large area of bleeding under the skin (it looks like a severe beating).
Finally, there was severe fatigue, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, broken bones, and death from liver and kidney failure.
In the early years of the voyage, there were countless deaths from scurvy because the food they sailed on was pasties, fish and salted meat, which contained very little vitamin C.
Between July 9, 1497 and May 30, 1498, when the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama found a route around Africa to reach India, more than 100 of his 160 crew members died of scurvy. of which more than 100 died of scurvy.
In 1519, Portuguese navigator Magellan led an ocean-going fleet from the east coast of South America to the Pacific Ocean.
Three months later, some of the crew had cracked tooth beds, some had nosebleeds, and some were weak.
By the time the ship reached its destination, only 35 of the original 200 survived.
But no one could find a reason for this.
After discovering the St. Lawrence River in 1536, French explorer Jacques Cartier traveled upriver to Quebec for the winter.
Twenty-four of the expedition died of scurvy, and many others became seriously ill.
An Indian cured them by teaching them to drink a tea made from the leaves of the arbor vitae (Thuja occidentalis) tree.
It was later discovered that the leaves of this tree contained 50 milligrams of vitamin C per 100 grams.
General Horan Cortes, who conquered Mexico in Spain, did not go on to invade Baja California, after occupying the lower part of the state in 1536, because most of the sailors suffered from scurvy and returned to their divisions so that they did not continue to invade the main part of the state.
In 1577 a Spanish galleon drifted on the surface of the Sargasso Sea and was found with all its crew dead of scurvy.
In contrast, in the 15th century, when Zheng He of the Ming Dynasty led many voyages to the West, there was no record of a large number of crew members dying of scurvy due to the long voyage, and this was related to the fact that Zheng He's fleet brought vegetables and fruits with him, and that the substances in the vegetables and fruits (which were later found to be Vitamin C) could be very helpful in the prevention and treatment of scurvy.
In 1734, on a ship bound for Greenland, a crew member was stricken with scurvy, which was incurable at the time, and the other crew members had to abandon him on a deserted island.
When he woke up, he was fed with weeds, and a few days later his scurvy was cured.
Scurvy like this has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of sailors.
In the winter of 1740, British Admiral Gee Anson led an expedition of 961 sailors on six ships.
Only 335 remained when they arrived on JuanFernandez Island in June 1741, and more than half the crew died of scurvy.
At the time, Admiral John Hawkins found that the chances of scurvy among seafarers on a long voyage were directly proportional to the amount of time they spent eating only dry rations.
If they had access to fresh food, including citrus fruits, they recovered quickly.
Because fresh fruits and vegetables are the hardest food to preserve on a ship, the British Navy has worked to develop alternatives.
The British naval medical officer James Lind did this very famous experiment on board ship, 12 severely scurvy seamen, everyone ate exactly the same food, the only difference in the drug was the then legendary cure for scurvy remedy.
Two of the patients ate two oranges and a lemon a day, the other two drank apple juice, and the others drank dilute sulfuric acid, sour vinegar, seawater, or some other medication that was believed to cure scurvy.
After six days, only the two who ate the fresh citrus fruit were better; the others were still sick.
Lind continued her research, and in 1753 she published A Treatise on Scurvy.
The famous British explorer Captain Cook is best known for his control of the dreaded scurvy.
He made three voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1780, and some of his crew fell ill, but none of them died of scurvy.
Scurvy was still rampant in many of his other expeditions at the same time.
Cook's contribution to the fight against scurvy led the Royal Society of London to elect him a Fellow and award him the Coply Medal.
Whenever the ship docked, Cook ordered the crew to go ashore to buy fruits, vegetables, and greens to supplement their diet.
On one occasion he brought 7,860 pounds of German Sauerkraut Sauerkraut aboard his flagship Endeavour, which gave each of the 70 men on board two pounds of provisions per week for a year's voyage.
Sauerkraut is rich in vitamin C, with 50 milligrams per 100 grams.
Although experienced mariners after Admiral Hawkins knew that lemon juice, instead of citrus fruits, could combat scurvy, it was expensive and difficult to store, and captains and ship's companies felt that it was better to trust it than to use it.
The public is also skeptical about the effectiveness of lemon juice, which is also controversial in the medical community.
When Lind died in 1795, he was a man of few words, and the results of his experiments were lost to obscurity.
But another British doctor, Gilbert Blane, believed in Lind's results, and in 1795 Blane was appointed to the British Navy Medical Board because he was the King's physician, and it was only because of his efforts that the British Admiralty decreed that every naval officer and soldier must drink 3/4 of an ounce of lemon juice every day.
In 1796, the number of scurvy cases in the British Navy dropped dramatically.
The British navy was so powerful that it defeated the Spanish Armada in 1797, creating the British Empire.
Although the Admiralty adopted lemon juice, the Ministry of Commerce did its own thing, and scurvy remained rampant in the British merchant marine.
It was 70 years later, in 1865, that the Ministry of Commerce made it mandatory for seafarers in the merchant marine to take lemon juice every day as well.
But at that time it was not known what substances in lemons were resistant to scurvy.
In 1907 Axel Holst and Theodor Frolich published a paper on scurvy using guinea pigs.
They observed that rats and other animals did not develop scurvy, but only guinea pigs, similar to humans, developed scurvy when fresh fruits and vegetables were withheld.
This is why modern medical research must use guinea pigs in experiments, so that the results can be extrapolated to human diseases.
We know that guinea pigs and primates (including humans) do not make their own vitamin C. All other animals make vitamin C in their livers or kidneys.
Most human diseases are rare in other animals.
Animals recover quickly from injuries and illnesses on their own; only humans require the specialized services of a doctor because they cannot produce their own vitamin C.
There is no reason why animals should not be able to produce vitamin C.
In 1912, Casimir Funk, a Polish-American scientist, synthesized the results of previous experiments and published a theory of vitamins.
He identified four substances in natural foods that could combat night blindness, beriberi, scurvy, and rickets.
These substances were called "life-sustaining amines (Vitamine)" by Funk, because the Latin word vita means life.
Funk assumed that these substances all contained nitrogen or amine groups, so he added the ending amine Amine.
Later it was discovered that some substances did not contain nitrogen, so they were renamed Vitamin, which is the Chinese word for vitamin or vitamin, and the four substances were called Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D.
In Chinese, they were called Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D.
Later it was discovered that some substances did not contain nitrogen, so they were renamed Vitamin.
Later discoveries were made alphabetically up to Vitamin K.
Vitamin B was found to have many different components, giving rise to names such as Vitamin B1, B2, B3, B6, and B12.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of organic chemists worked on vitamins, trying to analyze them in food and determine their chemical composition.
In 1928, the Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Gyyi succeeded in isolating 1 gram of pure vitamin C from bovine paracrine glands in the laboratory of the British chemist Frederick GowlandHopkins.
He was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1932 for his work on vitamin C and oxidative reactions in humans. Prize in Medicine in 1932 for his work on vitamin C and oxidative reactions in humans.
In 1928, he published a paper determining that the chemical formula for vitamin C is C6H8O6, so it is called Hexuronic acid.
In 1929, he traveled to Mayo Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, USA, to do research. The nearby slaughterhouse supplied him with a large number of bovine by-product kidneys free of charge, and from these he isolated 25 grams of vitamin C.
He was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1932 for his research on vitamin C and oxidation in humans.
He sent half of the pure vitamin C to Walter H. Haworth, a British carbohydrate chemist, for analysis.
But the technology was not yet mature enough for Haworth to determine the structure of vitamin C.
In 1930, Haworth's work on the structure of vitamin C was published.
In 1930, Szent-Gyyi returned to Hungary and discovered that the Hungarian chili peppers contained a large amount of vitamin C.
He succeeded in isolating one kilogram of pure Hexuronicacid from the peppers, and sent another batch to Haworth for further analysis.
In 1932 Charles King, a chemist in Pittsburgh, USA, knew from Joe Svirbely, a student of Szent-Gyyi, that he had identified Hexuronicacid as Vitamin C, and jumped at the chance to publish the result in Nature.
But the 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Szent-Gyyi anyway, for his work on vitamin C and oxidative reactions in the body.
Haworth determined the correct chemical structure of vitamin C.
And he used it in a way that was not a problem.
Haworth was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the correct chemical structure of vitamin C, and for producing it in a different way.
Szent-Gyyi and Haworth finally decided to name Vitamin C ascorbic acid.
In 1933, Swiss chemist Tadeus Reichstein invented a method of industrial production of Vitamin C.
This method of industrial production of Vitamin C is now known as ascorbic acid.
This method is to first reduce glucose to sorbitol, after bacterial fermentation to become sorbose, sorbose plus acetone to make di-acetone sorbose (Di-acetone sorbose), and then oxidized with chlorine and sodium hydroxide to become di-acetone-ketogulonic acid DAKS (Di-acetone-ketogulonicacid).
DAKS is dissolved in a mixed organic solution, which is catalytically reconstituted with acid to become vitamin C.
The patent for this method was purchased by Roche in 1934, and it has been the primary method of industrial production of vitamin C for over 50 years.
As a result, Roche had a monopoly on the vitamin C market.
In 1948, when SARS (formerly known as atypical pneumonia) became epidemic in the eastern United States, and in 1949, when polio became epidemic throughout the world, physicians from all over the world were at their wits' end, unable to do anything but quarantine the patients to prevent contagion.
Dr. Fred R. Klenner of South Carolina, USA, cured many patients of both with intravenous vitamin C.
Dr. Klenner was the first to use vitamin C in the United States.
Klenner found that intravenous vitamin C could cure all viral infections such as hepatitis, encephalitis, influenza, and many other acute and chronic conditions.
His experience and many other reports of the use of vitamins to cure diseases have been ignored by the medical profession.
The pharmaceutical industry pursued highly profitable patented drugs and vaccines, and unpatented vitamins were rejected and suppressed.
In 1959, American biochemist J. J. Burns discovered that humans and primates get scurvy because their livers lack the enzyme L-gulonolactoneoxidase, one of the four enzymes necessary to convert glucose to vitamin C.
In the United States, the enzyme L-gulonolactoneoxidase is one of four enzymes necessary to convert glucose to vitamin C.
So people must take vitamin C from food to stay healthy.
All other mammals make their own vitamin C in their livers, while amphibians and fish make it in their kidneys.
Many human-specific diseases, such as colds, flu, influenza, hepatitis, heart disease, and cancer, are rare in animals, and result from the body's inability to make the vitamin on its own.
In 1980, a researcher at the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Guanglin Yin, invented the "New Two-Step Fermentation Process for Vitamin C", which dramatically improved on Reichstein's one-step fermentation method and reduced the cost of producing vitamin C.
This method was developed in the late 1980s, and is now used in many other countries as well.
This method first reduces glucose to sorbitol, which is then converted to sorbose by the first bacterial fermentation, then to KGA (2-keto-gulonicacid) by the second bacterial fermentation, and finally isomerized to vitamin C.
The international right to use this patent was sold to Roche in Switzerland in 1985, and it was the largest technology transfer project from China to the world at that time. It was the largest Chinese foreign technology transfer program at the time.
Roche got the patent but did not use it, and continued to use the old Reichstein one-step fermentation method.
Its aim was to prevent other foreign companies from competing with the new method.
Domestic use of the patent in China was not sold off to Roche, and by the early 1990's 26 Chinese pharmaceutical companies were established to produce vitamin C using the two-step fermentation method.
In 1981, Dr. Robert Cathcart, MD, discovered a method for measuring vitamin C saturation in humans using diarrhea.
Oral overdose of vitamin C produces diarrhea.
Diarrhea shows that all organs of the body are saturated with vitamin C.
Normal diarrhea shows that the body is saturated with vitamin C.
Normal human vitamin C saturation is 4-15 grams per day.
Vitamin C saturation increases dramatically in people with illness, and the more severe the illness, the higher the vitamin C saturation, which can be as high as 200 grams per day.
A daily oral dose of vitamin C slightly below the saturated amount is a tried and true remedy for a variety of infections.
Dr. Cathcart has successfully cured 7000 colds, influenza, atypical pneumonia, acute mononucleosis, acute hepatitis, hay fever, asthma, trauma, surgical wounds, burns, back pain, arthritis, scarlet fever, vesicular fever, and zoster. .
This approach solves a 60-year controversy over the use of vitamin C for healing, which is the dosage of vitamin C for healing.
Many previous experiments have shown that vitamin C is ineffective because the dose is not saturated with it.
In the 1990s, the public recognized the limitations and shortcomings of Western medicine and sought out Alternative Medicine.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Chinese herbs, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and yuca became popular, and sales of all kinds of vitamins increased dramatically.
Several large international vitamin manufacturers have violated the rules of market competition by reaching secret price alliances and dividing the market in order to monopolize the vitamin market and gain high profits in the long run, with a view to controlling market prices.
The three major pharmaceutical manufacturers of vitamin C, Switzerland's Roche, Germany's BASF, and Japan's Takeda Pharmaceuticals, formed a vitamin C monopoly group, and the price of vitamin C increased from $4 per kilogram in 1973 to $18 per kilogram in 1994.
Lured by the high international price of vitamin C, many pharmaceutical companies in China have adopted the two-step fermentation method to try to enter the international market.
In 1996, the international vitamin C monopoly began to cut prices to compete against Chinese drug companies, reducing prices by 10% each month.
By 1997, the price of vitamin C had fallen to $4 per kilogram, forcing 22 of China's 26 vitamin C manufacturers to close, leaving only the Big Four, Northeast Pharmaceuticals, Shiyao Weisheng Pharmaceuticals, Huayao Vilkom Pharmaceuticals, and Jiangsu Jiangshan Pharmaceuticals, to hang on.
By 2002, the price had hit rock bottom at $2.30.
It is interesting to note that the international vitamin C monopoly group had to eat its own words and was unable to sustain the losses and all of them went out of business or disintegrated; Takeda's vitamin C plant was sold to BASF and shut down, and Roche's vitamin C plant was sold to DSM in the Netherlands.
In 1992, Dr. Mathias Rath and Bowling issued the "Call to Abolish HeartDiseases". Abolish HeartDiseases), claiming that vitamin C can treat a variety of conditions of the heart and blood vessels.
They also popularized the PaulingRecipe for heart disease, which consisted of vitamin C with two amino acids, lysine and proline.
They believed that these three compounds, taken together, could prevent and clear blockages in the coronary arteries.
In October 1994, President Clinton signed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) into law, stating that people have the right to sell and use all kinds of nutritional supplements, and that they cannot be prohibited or interfered with.
The Act was prompted by US pharmaceutical groups and the FDA lobbying Congress to pass a law that would classify vitamins and other supplements as drugs requiring a physician's prescription.
Once vitamins became prescription drugs, people were not allowed to buy them, and drug companies could raise prices and increase profits.
But when the news broke, the country was in an uproar, and Congress, driven by public opinion, instead passed the DSHEA bill without objection, guaranteeing people the right to take nutritional supplements.
The pharmaceutical groups' frustration in the US prompted them to change course and try to control the distribution of vitamin drugs under the umbrella of Codex Alimentarius, the UN's nutritional management committee.
Codex Alimentarius, an organization controlled by German drug companies, has been trying to pass a bill since 1996 to classify vitamins and other nutrients as medicines that require a physician's prescription.
This bill, if passed, would have to be complied with by every country in the world, including the United States, or face sanctions from the World Trade Organization.
Every year, Dr. Rath has called on the public to *** *** in front of the Codex Alimentarius meeting in Germany to oppose this bill.
As a result, the bill has not yet been passed.
In May 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust panel won its case, causing the world's most powerful vitamin maker at the time to eat its own words and pay $990 million in penalties for their price-fixing behavior.
As nine of the world's largest vitamin producers manipulated the sales price of vitamin C, the amount involved was as high as $5 billion, which not only increased the production costs of large users such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, but also seriously harmed the interests of consumers.
The U.S. Department of Justice accused Switzerland's Roche of being the originator of the price cartel and fined it $500 million, Germany's BASF was fined $225 million, and the others were fined by vitamin producers in Belgium, Germany, France, and Japan.
Roche's most senior executives pleaded guilty and went to US prisons to serve their sentences.
In November 2001, the EU also fined the above vitamin makers up to 855 million euros, including 462 million euros for Roche and 296 million euros for BASF.
In 2000, the global production of vitamin C 80,000 tons in 2001 surged to 100,000 tons, while the demand in the international market in the two years hovered around 85,000 tons, the prominent contradiction between supply and demand is the international vitamin C raw materials market in 2001 the most intense competition in the fundamental reasons, during the period of vitamin C raw materials per kilogram of the lowest market price had fallen to 2.3 U.S. dollars per kilogram.
In early 2002, with the two international giants Roche as well as Germany's BASF's strategic adjustments, Roche will sell the vitamin C business to the Netherlands DSM, BASF acquired Japan's Takeda's vitamin C production line and stop production.
Foreign companies reduced their production, and China exported 80% of the world's vitamin C market.
In 2001, China *** Vitamin C to coordinate the situation of low-price disorderly competition, led by the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Medicines and Health Products, including the four giants of the domestic Vitamin C enterprises held an industry meeting to discuss the development of the issue, as well as negotiating their respective export volume, and later formed a regular meeting every year.
Starting May 1, 2002, Vitamin C was classified as a controlled export commodity with a Customs valuation and a Chamber of Commerce pre-approval signature.
During the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis in 2002, Dr. Rice Rath placed huge advertisements in Hong Kong and Singapore advising the Chinese public that SARS was not a terminal disease and could be treated with Vitamin C.
Dr. Rice Rath's advertisement was a good example of how Vitamin C could be used in the treatment of SARS.
The cloud of SARS caused a rush for vitamin C in Asia, with the price of vitamin C skyrocketing to $16 per kilogram.
In the SARS epidemic, Bayer's production of "strength to extend the vitamin C effervescent tablets" was snapped up, in addition to the continuous operation of the domestic production line production, but also from Argentina to urgently transfer 100,000 boxes of 1 million "strength to extend", France, The company's production bases in France, Australia, and Argentina are all working in three shifts and producing around the clock to supply the Chinese market.
But once the crisis was over, the price of vitamin C fell back to $4 per kilogram.
In 2004, Shiyao Group Vital Pharmaceuticals a 15,000 tons of vitamin C production in Xianxian County, the total output reached 30,000 tons per year.
Other Vitamin C drug makers are waiting for another wave of price-cutting competition.
In June 2005, two U.S. companies filed an anti-monopoly lawsuit against China's Vitamin C quartet on the grounds that "the Chamber of Commerce organization coordinated the prices and allegedly colluded on prices.
In February 2006, the two U.S. companies filed another lawsuit in a different court.
As the litigation unfolded, international Vitamin C prices began to fall.
Since China's Vitamin C accounted for 85% of the U.S. market, the success or failure of the lawsuits was of great importance to the domestic Vitamin C companies, and led to the shutdown of domestic and foreign Vitamin C factories in turn.
In September 2005, DSM announced the official closure of its Belvidere Vitamin C API plant in New Jersey, which had an annual production capacity of 15,000 tons of Vitamin C ingredients.
In December 2005, BASF announced the closure of its Vitamin C plant in Grenna, Denmark, which had a production capacity of 4,000 tons per year.
In 2006, the wave of production stoppages affected the four domestic vitamin C giants, and in January the annual output of more than 20,000 tons of Chinese medicine Velcro Pharmaceuticals suspended production for 30 days.
In early April, the annual output of 20,000 tons of Jiangshan Pharmaceuticals also entered the shutdown phase, in mid-April, the annual output of 30,000 tons of Shijiazhuang Vitality Pharmaceuticals also began to enter the shutdown phase.
Northeast Pharmaceuticals, with an annual output of 23,000 tons, said it has no plan to stop production, but is considering it.
These four companies have a total output of nearly 100,000 tons, accounting for more than 90% of the domestic market, 87% of exports, and more than half of the international market.
The Chinese are playing a key role in mankind's fight against the virus.
China's large and densely populated areas are the most infectious and the most affected by the virus.
For example, many influenza viruses originated in China, and the SARS virus first appeared in China, where 90% of the deaths from SARS were Chinese.
Vitamin C is highly valued for its antiviral properties and prevention of viral infections.
China is emerging as a leader in the production of vitamin C, but the average dose of vitamin C taken by Chinese people is much lower than in Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Many viral infections could be prevented if the principles of vitamin C prevention and treatment of viral infections were universally recognized and taken in the right amounts.
The real power of vitamin C will be seen in the treatment of more serious viral infections such as bird flu, SARS and AIDS.