St Johns Wort shows hope for West Nile

None of the information below has been verified

West Nile Virus, although new to the U.S., is well documented. The Centers for Disease Controlidentifies it as a flavivirus, a member of the Toga virus family. It is closely related to yellow fever and dengue fever. This is important because the Toga virus family are encapsulated viruses,i.e., they are covered with a lipid (fatty)coating.

This is exciting, because it means the virus isaccessible to treatment utilizing high quality St.John’s Wort (SJW). Several studies have been doneon a variety of encapsulated viruses, includingherpes simplex virus types 1 and 2, parainfluenzavirus, vaccinia virus, cytomegalovirus and severalretroviruses including HIV1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10.

Non-encapsulated viruses or “naked” viruses werealso studied for comparison purposes10,13.

SJW was a potent anti-viral agent across a variety ofencapsulated virus families, but showed noactivity against naked viruses.

Unlike a vaccine that is specific to eachorganism, SJW is active against encapsulated viruses by a variety of mechanisms, including light activation, interference with DNA transcription, impairing the assembly of intactviral particles and the lipophilic (fat-loving)nature of the ring structures (the quinone andphenolic groups)4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. These ring structures are critical to the biologic activity of SJW.

From these results, it is reasonable to use highquality, pharmaceutical grade SJW in combatingWest Nile Virus, since there are no effective pharmaceutical agents.

Quality is critical since the level of hypericin and pseudohypericin arekey. I can only recommend the SJW product produced by Medi-Herb, which is a pharmaceutical house in Australia, adhering to pharmaceutical manufacturing standards. The product isdistributed by Standard Process through alternative health care practitioners, including doctors of chiropractic, acupuncturists and veterinarians. SJW is quite unstable and theactive ingredients degrade on store shelves. An independent analysis of 3 products (all of whichwere certified to contain 0.3% hypericin) wereshown to be widely variant, with one product 25%below label claims. It is critically important that the phytochemical integrity of the wholeplant be preserved for maximum efficacy.16

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