One of the all-cause mortality reductions of vitamin D may stem from the fact that it is synthesized from a cholesterol precursor, thus removing it from the bloodstream. Supplementing would not have this benefit.
This hypothesis is testable by following a group of sunlight-synthesized vitamin D patients and comparing them against a group which receives less sunlight exposure and supplements the difference.
There are two types of traits which people refer to as “intelligence”, and two regions of the brain with their storage infrastructure: there’s the ability to draw new insights from disparate data, mediated by inductive long-term retrieval (hippocampus) and there’s the ability to draw formal and rapid mathematical/logical conclusions from existing theorems, mediated by working memory (anterior cingulate cortex).
One treatment which would probably be fairly effective to counteract an infection with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium which causes symptoms by secreting a toxin (such as pathogenic E. Coli which releases a Shiga toxin) is to induce an immune response (via immunoglobulin) against the toxin rather than the bacterium for the duration of the traditional symptomatic period. This should alleviate the symptoms as long as treatment is followed, and when the treatment ends the underlying infection will have been fought off by the immune system. Thus patients would be technically infected (and infectious) but would not exhibit symptoms caused by the toxin.
Here’s a study which demonstrates that it is possible to induce an immune response against the Shiga toxin in mice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC321607/
I’ve been thinking of ways to produce long-term localized immunosuppression recently in order to help people with autoimmune diseases. What I’ve dreamed up this time is a device similar to a radioactive “seed” used for prostate cancer, but delivering an inhibitor of cellular signaling (take your pick of interleukins) in direct response to a high concentration of inflammatory cytokines. By carefully controlling the dose in response to environmental conditions, it should be possible to produce a strong localized immunosuppressive response without too much of the drug entering systemic circulation.
Corticosteroids aren’t an option – one challenge is to find something that can be used long-term with few side effects.