Another potent antibiotic is always welcome. I will add though that these old concoctions are way too complex to be discovered at random particularly after the revelation from the Shamans in the Amazon that their concoctions are learned during ayahuasca visions. Something similar could well have happened here.
The effectiveness particularly stands out. It is not marginal at all and its development will be well worth tracking.
Hopefully it retains potency
.
Deadly MRSA Superbug Killed By 1000-Year-Old Anglo-Saxon Remedy
By Aditya Tejas @Artejas a.tejas@ibtimes.com on March 31 2015 6:11 AM EDT
A 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye
infections has been found to be effective against antibiotic-resistant
superbugs, researchers from the University of Nottingham said on Monday.
The scientists recreated a 9th Century remedy to treat styes.
The age-old remedy called for "cropleek and garlic, of both
equal quantities, pound them well together … take wine and bullocks
gall, mix with the leek … let it stand nine days in the brass vessel," according to the New Scientist.
Some of the ingredients, such as copper from the brass
vessel, have antimicrobial properties, but the scientists were not sure
if the recipe would be effective against infection. They tested it on
tissue samples from mice infected with the MRSA superbug, an
antibiotic-resistant strain of Staph, which the U.S. National Institute of Health says has “evolved from a controllable nuisance into a serious public health concern.”
The researchers had the idea during an academic meeting to
discuss infectious diseases where Anglo-Saxon expert Christina Lee told
microbiologists about Bald’s Leechbook -- an Anglo-Saxon medical text
that contained remedies for various ailments. She translated the text of
the recipe, which proved to be an “incredibly potent” antibiotic,
according to lead researcher Freya Harrison.
The concoction killed up to 90 percent of MRSA bacteria in infected mice.
“I still can’t quite believe how well this one thousand
year old antibiotic actually seems to be working, when we got the first
results we were just utterly dumbfounded. We did not see this coming at
all,” Harrison told The Independent.
The ingredients were found to have little effect
individually, and the researchers speculate that they react in some
unknown way to become more potent when brought together.
Lee said the remedy is just one of many potentially useful
infection treatments contained in ancient texts. “Modern research into
disease can benefit from past responses and knowledge, which is largely
contained in non-scientific writings. But the potential of these texts
to contribute to addressing the challenges cannot be understood without
the combined expertise of both the arts and science,” she said in a Monday press release.
The team is due to present its findings at the annual
conference of Society for General Microbiology in Birmingham on
Wednesday, and the results of the study will be shortly submitted to the
journal Nature.
"This truly cross-disciplinary project explores a new
approach to modern health care problems by testing whether medieval
remedies contain ingredients which kill bacteria or interfere with their
ability to cause infection," Harrison said in the statement.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that
at least 2 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant
bacteria every year, and at least 23,000 people die from these
infections.
No comments:
Post a Comment