Medicinal Power of Human Urine!

The title of the article itself must have caught a good deal of your attention! Most of you probably might have been getting a yuck! feeling imagining the consumption of Human Urine as a Medicine! But it's true! Human Urine is more than just an excretory-waste liquid thrown out of the body a couple of times a day.

Rather, there are companies making Billions of dollars by selling drugs extracted from Human Urine, and there are instances in the world where people have been cured of diseases like chronic cystitis drinking their own Urine! So, the focus of this article is to deliver insights into the concept of Human Urine as a Medicine.

"Urine is Sterile Liquid!"

Firstly, one should get rid of the notion that Urine might be containing a lot of contamination/microbes. Human Urine is aseptic and ultra-sterile. Only those humans, suffering from some UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) tend to excrete microbe infected urine. Otherwise, Human Urine is free of infectious organisms. So, this removes one of the key hurdles towards use of urine as a medicine.

Human Urine is Free of Toxic Metabolites

Another important fact one should be aware of is that " Human Urine is Free of Toxic Metabolites" It's the job of Human Liver to detoxify the blood (not of kidneys) of toxic metabolites generated upon digestion of food/medicinal intake. The toxins are then excreted out of the body as fecal matter (not in urine). Urine is rather produced in the kidneys, where the job of nephrons (cells, functional unit of kidneys), is to mediate the filtration of blood to rid it off excess urea, salts, Zinc, Iron, Calcium, Manganese, Magnesium, Some Pigments, vitamins, Hormones, Amino Acids,Glucose, and water, to maintain Homeostasis (a condition of balance) in the body.

An Important Point About Urine
It's just a liquid secreted by body to expel excess "important substances" out of the body. Almost every component excreted in urine has a role to play in human body, but it's excreted out only because body has a particular threshold requirement of every element, any amount in excess is needless, and is excreted if that cannot be stored (Best example being vitamins and hormones, which are never stored in body. If they are in excess, they will be coming out of the body in Urine.

Medicinal Components in Urine
Needless to say, almost every component in human urine has a potential to be a medicine (depending upon the cases/deficits). Here are a few categories:

A. Enzymes
Pharma companies are always hankering after the ways to extract enymes/proteins out of the human urine. They are one of the billion dollars components of the urine. Best example to cite this is " Urokinase" an enzyme extracted from urine which is a miracle drug for dissolving blood clots in coronary arteries.

B. Urea
One of the key components excreted out of body in urine. Owing to it's moisturizing capabilities, it's a key constituent of world renowned creams/lotions. Most of you must have used or known someone having used MURINE EAR & EYE DROPS? Well, they are used to moisturize the eyes/ears (rest goes needless to say I guess).

C. Hormones
Another component(s) of Urine with a billion dollar market cap! All the excess hormones like testosterone, FSH, LH etc are secreted in urine. And, each of these is a routine part of Hormone therapy of billions of people round the globe! A popular fertility drug obtained from urine, named "Pergonal" which is a mixture of follicle-stimulating hormones (FSH) and Luteinizing hormone (LH) had a starting market of $800 million in 1992 only. One can easily imagine the size of market it might have covered till date!

D. Vitamins and Amino Acids
Alanine, Arginine, Ascorbic acid, Biotin, Folic acid, Glutamic acid, Glycine, Inositol,Lysine, Methionine, Nitrogen, Pantothenic acid, Phenylalaline, Riboflavin, Tryptophan, Tyrosine, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12 are some of the common excretory products of urine, but all of them indispensable for the body.

The reason behind Bear Grylls' (Man Vs Wild, Discovery Channel) recommendation for taking your own urine when there's nothing else to survive on, is very valid. Your urine has a lot to contribute to your body in extreme situations of drought/food shortage!

E. Tendency to Free an Allergic Person from Allergies
Research has proved that due to the fact that urine has the antigen receptors responsible for causing allergic responses in a person suffering from allergy to a particular antigen, if the person is made to drink his/her own urine, he/she may develop antibodies against the antigen that can rid him/her off future inflammations! (An immunity to allergy!)

There's a lot one can explore about the medicinal properties of human urine (in India, people are rather obsessed for Cow's Urine too), this was just an attempt to bring a fact into picture.

Antibiotic-resistance genes in viruses in fossilised 14th century human faecal sample

A discovery of viruses harbouring antibiotic-resistance genes in fossilised faecal samples dating from the 14th century could have implications not only for microbiologists but also for archaeologists, historians and anthropologists. The discovery was made by French researchers who studied samples from latrines from the period uncovered during an urban renewal project in the city of Namur in Belgium. The study is published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

The viruses found in the coprolites (fossilised faecal samples) are phages, i.e. viruses that infect bacteria rather than eukaryotes. These phages were examined by a mixture of “electron microscopy, high-throughput sequencing and suicide PCR approaches” according to corresponding author Christelle Desnues of Aix Marseille Université. The presence of the phages in the coprolites indicates that they would also have been present in the gastrointestinal tract. Many of the phage sequences identified were related to phages known in modern times to infect bacteria commonly identified in stools, including both harmless, helpful and pathogenic bacteria.

The findings revealed that the phages carried genes for antibiotic resistance, long before antibiotics were used therapeutically. The phages also carried toxin-resistance genes. Both antibiotics and toxins are commonly found in nature. The authors believe that these resistance genes would have protected gut bacteria. In this regard, they would have been essential in maintaining gut metabolism and health as the helpful bacteria inhabiting the gut and other body areas are important in human health. The results are consistent with other studies, for example of the human oral microbiome in skeletons of 1000 years old in which antibiotic-resistance genes were also found.

The phages in the coprolites differed taxonomically those within modern human faecal samples. However, Dr Desnues says that functionally their role has conserved. This adds weight to the hypothesis that the viral community in the human gastrointestinal tract play a fundamental role which has been conserved over centuries, despite dramatic changes in human diet and living conditions. The researchers are currently expanding their studies to fungi and parasites in the coprolites.

Sources:

Press release from American Society for Microbiology; available at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...022714.php [Accessed 28 February 2014].

APPELT, S., FANCELLO, L., LE BAILLY, M., RAOULT, D., DRANCOURT, M. and DESNUES, C., 2014. Viruses in a 14th-century coprolite. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. published ahead of print 7 February 2014 doi:10.1128/AEM.03242-13

WARINNER, C., RODRIGUES, J.F.M., VYAS, C., TRACHSEL, R., SHVED, N., GROSSMANN, J., RADINI, A., HANCOCK, Y., TITO, R.Y., FIDDYMENT, S., SPELLER, M., HENDY, J., CHARLTON, S., LUDER, H.U., SALAZAR-GARCÍA, D.C., EPPLER, E., SEILER, R., HANSEN, L.H., SAMANIEGO CASTRUITA, J.A., BARKOW-OESTERREICHER, S., TEOH, K.Y., KELSTRUP, C.D., OLSEN, J.V., NANNI, P., KAWAI, T., WILLERSLEV, E., VON MERING, C., LEWIS JR, C.M., COLLINS, M.J., GILBERT, M.T.P., RÜHLI, F. and CAPPELLINI, E., 2014. Pathogens and host immunity in the ancient human oral cavity. Nature Genetics 2014; doi:10.1038/ng.2906 (Advance online publication).