Society is rapidly losing its battle against emerging and reemerging infections. HIV continues to inflict considerable human and economic damage, and HINI is causing death, overwhelming health services, and threatening to intensify in the fall with a more virulent strain. The tuberculosis bacillus shows signs of resisting conventional treatment, as does the malaria parasite. Influenza, the agents of food poisoning, methicillin- resistant staphylococcus aureus (MSRA), and hospital- acquired infections (HAIs) take their gloomy toll. Global warming may invite such tropical diseases as malaria to our shores.

Stimulating immune function would transform the prevention, treatment, research and economics of infectious disorders. Immunostimulation is propagandized as unavailable, but as early as nineteen eighty-one, published evidence showed that lithium and antidepressants have clinically relevant, immunostimulating and antimicrobial properties. Lithium and antidepressants have been overlooked as immunostimulants, chiefly because they promise to save a fortune, rather than create one.

Antidepressants can remit tuberculosis, canker sores, cold sores, genital herpes, upper respiratory tract infections, and plantar warts. They can destroy the organisms of various parasitic diseases, including malaria, and are lethal to disease causing fungi and bacteria. Remission of such manifestations of viral infections as sinusitis, bronchitis, frequent colds, sore throats, cold sores and genital herpes in patients taking lithium has been reported. Lithium and antidepressants can reduce the rates of common, “flu-like” colds, and lithium is capable of preventing recurrences of staphylococcal and streptococcal skin infections.*

Developing a vaccine for viruses has the disadvantage of having to know the strain, especially a virus such as the human immunodeficiency virus that is known to be rapidly mutating. That problem does not apply to immunostimulants: once stimulated, an immune system is likely to be effective against all strains. One cannot say whether lithium or antidepressants are best suited to HINI, until clinical responses are observed. If not adapted to pandemic preparedness, a disaster may yet befall us. In the 28 years that immunostimulation has been available, vested interests have suppressed it. Among them, government and private laboratories have tried to replicate it using other methods, but they have failed, and are unlikely to succeed.     

*Lieb, J. ”The immunostimulating and antimicrobial properties of lithium and antidepressants.” J Infection (2004) 49 88-93 (The eighth of nine reviews published since 1981).