Zinc is an important micronutrient that plays a key role in the immune response, and there is clear evidence that alcoholism has detrimental effects on zinc homeostasis (Rodriguez-Moreno et al., 1997;Mills et al., 1983). Studies in zinc-deficient children exhibit a vulnerability to pneumonia (Bhandari et al., 1996), and there is clinical evidence that zinc supplementation can be effective in reducing the incidence of pneumonia in certain pediatric populations (Bhandari et al., 2002). In animal models, zinc deficiency has been shown to increase susceptibility and severity to pneumonia as well as decrease the effectiveness of vaccination to organisms such as pneumococcus (Strand et al., 2003). Taken together, these studies illustrate that zinc has important immune functions in the lung. However, zinc deficiency in the lung has not been well studied in the setting of alcohol abuse. Recently, we determined that chronic alcohol ingestion causes zinc deficiency within the alveolar space (Joshi et al., 2008). In this study we extended those findings to an experimental model of bacterial pneumonia in vivo and, as expected, alcohol-fed rats showed an increased lung bacterial burden
