TB Vaccine Prevents Alzheimers  

By Shlomo Maital

      Science reporter Ruth Schuster, writing in the daily Haaretz, reports on new research, showing that a Tuberculosis vaccine – an old one – may prevent dementia!  This is promising, hopeful – and crucial, because we don’t know how to reverse Alzheimer’s, or cure it, nor even diagnose it for certain until autopsy (after death).

      What is the vaccine?   It is called BCG – Bacillus Calmette-Guerin,  developed to fight tuberculosis in the early 1900’s!  It is a live vaccine, a weakened strain of bovine (non-human) TB.  The vaccine has generalized immune-system-stimulating characteristics and is even used today for treating superficial bladder cancer.  Researchers have found that bladder cancer survivors treated with BCG had lower rates of Alzheimer’s and even Parkinson’s.

        Dementia is a huge problem.  The WHO says 55 million people were diagnosed with dementia as of 2020 – and that’s a huge underestimate.  It may double by 2050.

         Two researchers – Prof. emeritus Charles Greenblatt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Richard Lathe, Univ. of Edinburgh Medical School, have published two key papers in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (so far, just the abstracts have been in print). 

           The authors review research and state: “Once one gets a BCG shot against TB as a kiddie, one has diminished risk of Alzheimer’s in old age”. 

             Think prevention! the authors state.  Apparently, the weakened bacillus sticks around in our brains, from childhood, and helps the body fight off the amyloid plaque that gums up our brains and causes dementia.  A small piece of evidence:  Alzheimer’s rates are lower in the developing world, where the BCG vaccine is still widely used, than in the developed world, where BCG has been replaced by more modern TB vaccines.