Limes May Guard Women From Infections During Sex

By Amber Hsiao | Wednesday, March 22, 2006

With nearly 14,000 people worldwide being infected by HIV daily, lime juice may provide the answer to the decades-old AIDS/HIV public health issue.

Researchers at UC Berkeley have been testing lime juice for use as a microbicide—a compound or substance that is used to reduce transmission of infections. It may be used up to eight hours prior to sexual intercourse that could discreetly protect women of a wide range of backgrounds from sexually transmitted infections, or STIs.

HIV research policy prevention methods have mainly consisted of abstinence and the ABC approach—A for abstinence, B for being faithful and C for correct and consistent condom use.

“The problem with that is that it doesn’t work for a lot of women, especially in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Anke Hemmerling, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public. “They have no way of controlling their sexuality; using condoms and contraceptives is simply not an option.”

The idea of using limes as microbicides stemmed from Roger Short, a professor at the University of Melbourne, a friend of professor Malcolm Potts in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Short observed that people in other countries have been douching for thousands of years with limes after intercourse to prevent pregnancy. Potts thus sent anthropologists to Nigeria to study the use of such acidic preparations because of its ability to destroy HIV.

“We found out that half of all northern Nigerian sex workers had actually been douching with some type of lime preparation for years and years after each client, or after the business day,” Hemmerling said. “No one has ever looked into if it was effective in real life and was safe. We felt that we needed to test if lime juice was actually safe.”

Hemmerling conducted a study by recruiting 25 UC Berkeley students from decal classes, using a 20 percent lime-to-water dilution obtained from animal studies. The 25 participants used a lime-juice soaked tampon every night for two weeks, abstained from sex and visited the Tang Center for a series of tests that checked for vaginal wall problems.

“If you have sex, there is other irritation going on, so we wanted to make sure that the only irritation going on would be from lime, not your fun weekend. So, it was really important that people were abstinent,” Hemmerling said. “I am happy to report that we did not see any severe irritation. Nevertheless, don’t try this at home—don’t start to use lime or skip condoms tomorrow.”

“We know that negotiating your sex life and condom use—even in the U.S.—is usually hard and this could be an alternative to that.”

While Hemmerling’s focus has been studying the safety of lime juice, other UC Berkeley researchers have been equally engaged in pushing to gain support from pharmaceutical companies to back the research. It takes about $50 million to develop a drug in the United States, so the prospects for revenue are low, researchers said.

“Pharmaceutical companies haven’t really been investing money in microbicides, so we were interested in assessing if there was perhaps a lucrative market out there that could help offset development and get big pharma involved,” said Bethany Young Holt, a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

In Holt’s study on microbicides, participants aged 18 to 30 were recruited from Berkeley and community colleges.

“We decided to look at college students—young women, namely, because there’s a lot of unprotected sex on college campuses,” Holt said. “We used an approach that is used by market researchers to learn what women would want in a microbicide if it were available.”

The researchers found that approximately 40 percent of women were very worried about getting pregnant and 36 percent were very worried about getting an STI, but their concern about contracting HIV was not very high. However, 69 percent of the participants were interested in purchasing their ideal microbicide if it were available in the market.

The ideal microbicide to this group would protect against STIs, offer as much protection as condoms and be available over the counter, among other things.

The price of buying the microbicide would vary depending on manufacturer. When they are exported, organizations such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations could help subsidize the cost, researchers said.

“Ideally, they won’t cost any more than what people pay for condoms or birth control,” Holt said. “And initially, they’re going to be available by prescription only, but eventually the idea is that you’ll be able to go to your 7-Eleven and get them.”

Researchers hope that microbicide research and development will continue to garner the necessary support from policymakers, the pharmaceutical industry and the government.

“We know that negotiating your sex life and condom use—even in the U.S.—is usually hard and this could be an alternative to that,” Hemmerling said. “We showed that, yes, there is a market in the first-world too, and maybe big pharma should think again.”

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Originally appeared in the Daily Californian, Science-Technology section. See the original article.