Ozone Therapy: A Possible Answer to Ebola?

By Dr. Mercola

Ebola is heavily featured in the news these days, bringing lots of fear and concerns. Can anything be done to successfully treat or prevent this horrific and highly lethal disease?

Dr. Robert Rowen who is a leading expert on oxidative therapy, offers an intriguing answer in this interview. By invitation of the President of Sierra Leone, he’s going there to teach health care workers how to treat Ebola using ozone.

“I do ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation therapy, and high-dose vitamin C,” he explains. “All of these collectively belong to a family of therapies called oxidative therapies.

In my opinion – and I’ve been doing them longer than any other living person in North America; since 1986 – especially ozone and ultraviolet [therapies] are among the most powerful therapies for healing across the board of anything I’ve ever seen in my career… It does so by stimulating your own body to heal.”

Ozone Effectively Inactivates Viruses

Ozone is quite versatile, as you can administer it in many different ways. It’s extraordinary in terms of its anti-infective and antiviral action, and it has virtually no toxicity, making it a prime candidate for both prevention and treatment.

Dr. Rowen’s YouTube channel¹ contains a number of videos demonstrating and discussing what these therapies can do. With bacteria, ozone works by puncturing the membrane of the bacteria, causing it to spill its contents and die. It also inactivates viruses, and does so 10 times faster than chlorine.

“I’ve told my patients and readers, please know where your closest oxidative physician is, because your life might depend on it, and if you have the wherewithal, to get an [ozone] machine to purify water.

It can be easily adapted in the privacy of your home, so that you can administer it rectally for whatever condition you have,” Dr. Rowen says.

Ozone—The Most Powerful Natural Oxidant in the World

Chlorine is being used overseas right now for Ebola to disinfect clothes and isolation suites, etc. But ozone actually disinfects 10 times faster than chlorine. It’s the most powerful natural oxidant in the world.

Ozone also has the advantage of stimulating the immune system, and modulating it—either up or down depending on what your system requires.

“Right now, we’re faced with probably one of the most horrific epidemics human kind has ever known. That’s a virus called Ebola that is transmitted by personal contact [through] bodily fluids and, actually, it may be also be airborne,” Dr. Rowen says.

“What I don’t know – and I’m trying to investigate – is how easily it is transmitted from person to person. I’m not sure that it’s easy to get, because if it was, everybody should be dead by now in many of the villages, and not everybody is dead.

On the other hand, we know that there are aid workers who have gotten the disease and died even though they were wearing full suits…

Anybody who works with Ebola are putting their lives on the line because there are no conventional therapies for this; none, except getting supportive care…”  

How Ozone Works to Combat Infectious Disease

As noted by Dr. Rowen, Ebola hijacks your immune system and suppresses it. Once your immune system realizes the virus is there, it launches a cytokine storm, and it is this cytokine storm that leads to massive tissue destruction and capillary leakage.

This is what causes the hemorrhaging associated with Ebola. Ozone modulates the cytokine storm.

It’s anti-infective. It improves circulation and blood flow, oxygen delivery, and likely upregulates mitochondrial respiration, thereby generating more energy in your cells. Oxygen is one of the most important things your body needs for tissue healing when you’re riddled with infection.

There’s an experimental, still unapproved treatment for Ebola called ZMapp. It offers passive immunity to the virus. This is not a vaccine but three monoclonal antibodies that have been humanized by genetic engineering and grown in tobacco plants. It’s very costly and time consuming to produce and it’s not yet commercially available.

ZMapp works with your body’s immune system, slowing down the viral load to give your body enough time to respond and not get killed by the cytokine storm. It’s not really a drug in the conventional sense, as it acts simply by slowing down the virus from reaching the cells.

This is similar to ozone’s action, but ozone could potentially be more effective, as it works both indirectly and directly. It’s directly toxic to the virus while being harmless to your body’s own cells, and also indirectly enhances your immune system function. Regarding potential safety concerns of ozone, Dr. Rowen says:

“Ozone is only hard on the lungs, but it can be given in other ways. It can be given intravenously. It can be given in the bladder, in the vagina, in the rectum, via injection – anywhere. It’s just [that] it can be tough on the lungs. You don’t want to be breathing it…

Also, the way ozone can be done is dirt cheap. And in a place like Africa, where there are thousands of people with this and there’s just no money, can you imagine what it will mean to the planet if we can treat this disease with a therapy that will cost probably less than 10 dollars per patient?”