Mycobacterium Tuberculosis vials for healing?

Question

Recently I was helping my family clean out the guest room that my uncle was living in and in one of the drawers we found 4 small bottles/vials labeled mycobacterium tuberculosis 6x. When we asked him about them he didn't really give an answer but we know he got them from some natural homeopathic doctor he goes to. Does anyone know if this is a normal natural method of healing? We are kind of concerned as to why a person would have something like bottles of TB but we are still unsure if this is actually the disease or just some alternative medicine.

Answer 1

Well, as you know M.tuberculosis is the bacillus that causes tuberculosis and well, i really doubt it's some sort of cure since TB is a really serious disease that instead of helping tissue it causes formations (primarily) in the lungs called granulomas. These are like, round accumulations of cells that develop because the body's immune system (here it's mainly the macrophages) and are due to the fact that the bacilli can't be destroyed. All around the granuloma is chronic inflammation and caseous necrosis (tissue death). I mean, it's not at all something you'd want near you for healing methods. What TB does is truely awful to the respiratory system and, through the circulatory system, the bacteria can migrate to other tissue and wreck havoc there which would be even worse.

Conventional medicine and alt medicine don't always go hand in hand, especially because conventional medicine is usually subject to the scientific method of investigation which basically cancels out any zany hypothesis. Anyways, like a reader above said, you should definetly not open the jars since TB can live for months and even years in the open environment looking for a host. Incinerating is probably your best bet or take it to a science lab where they'll know what to do with it. Hope that helped!

Here's a pic of caseous necrosis, it's the yellow stuff that looks like cheese: http://www.mevis.de/~hhj/Lunge/ima/TbPathTb.JPG

Answer 2

TB is really quite dangerous. I don't know about an alternative medicine, but if you suspect that the vials may contain Mycobacterium tuberculosis then follows these instructions. Either contact your GP surgery or a university laboratory and thell them you think you might have some TB. Do not open the vials at all, certainly do not tip them down the sink. They ought to be incenerated and it is important that you pass them on to a professional of some sort.

I work in a lab that uses and experiments on TB and other mycobacterium

Answer 3

A good starting point is: Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, a joint publication of the CDC/NIH. Your next stop should be a major University Hospital medical library. The librarian will help you find the most recent publication on cultures and propagation and testing for drug resistance. Then visit the Hospital Lab where this is done.