AIDS | Bitter fruit | Economist.com

AIDS | Bitter fruit | Economist.com: "LIME juice is famous in medical history. Sailors—particularly British sailors—drank it to keep scurvy at bay. But the past few years have seen another use mooted. This is that, if applied to the vagina, it might protect a woman from HIV infection, and thus from AIDS. On April 24th a group of researchers met at the Microbicides 2006 conference in Cape Town to discuss the matter.

Though a lime-juice douche sounds a ghastly idea, women have been putting acids into their vaginas for millennia, in the hope of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, cleaning with lime juice is common practice in parts of Africa. Of 200 prostitutes surveyed in 2004 in the Nigerian city of Jos, 163 said they rinsed with lemon or lime juice before or after sex to prevent pregnancy and infections. The question is, are they sensible to do so?

Acids immobilise sperm and kill pathogens, including HIV. (Laboratory studies have shown that a one-in-five dilution of lemon or lime juice inactivated 90% of HIV in just two minutes.) And, in addition to its high citric-acid content, lime juice has a second attractive feature: it literally grows on trees."