Ancient Remedy For Super Bug

[Changexpert]

Interesting read...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/offbe...-kills-deadly-superbug/ar-AAafOS7?ocid=HPCDHP
http://www.newscientist.com/article...ills-hospital-superbug-mrsa.html#.VRqhz690ypp

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.

Unexpectedly, the ingredients had little effect unless they were all brought together. "The big challenge is trying to find out why that combination works," says Steve Diggle, another of the researchers. Do the components work in synergy or do they trigger the formation of new potent compounds?

Using exactly the right method also seems to be crucial, says Harrison, as another group tried to recreate the remedy in 2005 and found that their potion failed to kill bacteria grown in a dish. "With the nine-day waiting period, the preparation turned into a kind of loathsome, odorous slime," says Michael Drout of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.


I wonder how safe it is to drink odorous slime What's interesting is that the ingredients fail to kill the bacteria when used individually or combined in wrong proportion/method. I hope scientists can find the secret to this potion very soon.

 

[MCRobbie]

Stories like these are fascinating because it suggests that earlier peoples had substantial knowledge, greater than our own in some cases. If it is as effective as researchers claim and it only is effective under the most stringent and involved alchemist methods, it means the creators of this concoction had to have created this formula with great care, and trial and error over possibly eons, testing and observing the effectiveness of their formulas until their effectiveness was obvious. That takes great intelligence, patience, and powers of observation. Great story.

 

[Wayne]

I can easily see implications for pwCFS.

Medieval Garlic and Bile Potion Kills MRSA Superbug

"We thought that Bald's eyesalve might show a small amount of antibiotic activity, because each of the ingredients has been shown by other researchers to have some effect on bacteria in the lab," said microbiologist Freya Harrison.

"Copper and bile salts can kill bacteria, and the garlic family of plants make chemicals that interfere with the bacteria's ability to damage infected tissues." -- When they performed their tests, they "were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was. ... It obliterated the MRSA, killing 999 out of 1,000 bacterial cells."

 

[Bob]

Here's a BBC video and article:

1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32124642
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-32117815

 

[Legendrew]

Near all modern treatments stem from age old knowledge and herbal remedies; people from years gone by knew what worked, they just didn't know why and how. All we do that they didn't is study these treatments more and concentrate the key chemicals to increase their inherent properties.

 

[barbc56]

I would like to see the original study. It looks like this was only tested on cells from rats. Then the various media sources make the leap that it's a cure for MRSA.

If I am reading correctly, it's an intriguing premise which may or may not pan out in future studies.

The bane of science media and press releases is that the reporting sometimes hypes only part of the content of a study for ratings and doesn't give a complete picture of what's really going on. This is why we often see contradictory information in the news. For example, we read that a diet is beneficial then in the future the opposite is reported.

I started a thread on this.
http://fns.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/out-of-sight-out-of-mind-out-of-the-peer-reviewed-literature.35749/

Still intriguing. I love garlic.

Barb

 

[natasa778]

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pr...medieval-remedy-for-modern-day-superbugs.aspx

The team now has good, replicated data showing that Bald’s eye salve kills up to 90% of MRSA bacteria in ‘in vivo’ wound biopsies from mouse models. They believe the bactericidal effect of the recipe is not due to a single ingredient but the combination used and brewing methods/container material used. Further research is planned to investigate how and why this works.

Historical curiosity
The testing of the ancient remedy was the idea of Dr Christina Lee, Associate Professor in Viking Studies and member of the University’s Institute for Medieval Research. Dr Lee translated the recipe from a transcript of the original Old English manuscript in the British Library.

The recipe calls for two species of Allium (garlic and onion or leek), wine and oxgall (bile from a cow’s stomach).

...
The team then went on to see what happened if they diluted the eye salve – as it is hard to know just how much of the medicine bacteria would be exposed to when applied to a real infection. They found that when the medicine is too dilute to kill Staphylococcus aureus, it interfered with bacterial cell-cell communication (quorum sensing). This is a key finding, because bacteria have to talk to each other to switch on the genes that allow them to damage infected tissues. Many microbiologists think that blocking this behaviour could be an alternative way of treating infection.

...
“Genuinely amazed”
University microbiologist, Dr Freya Harrison has led the work in the laboratory at Nottingham with Dr Steve Diggle and Research Associate Dr Aled Roberts. She will present the findings at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology which starts on Monday 30th March 2015 in Birmingham.

Dr Harrison commented: “We thought that Bald’s eyesalve might show a small amount of antibiotic activity, because each of the ingredients has been shown by other researchers to have some effect on bacteria in the lab – copper and bile salts can kill bacteria, and the garlic family of plants make chemicals that interfere with the bacteria’s ability to damage infected tissues. But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was. We tested it in difficult conditions too; we let our artificial ‘infections’ grow into dense, mature populations called ‘biofilms’, where the individual cells bunch together and make a sticky coating that makes it hard for antibiotics to reach them. But unlike many modern antibiotics, Bald’s eye salve has the power to breach these defences.”

Dr Steve Diggle added: “When we built this recipe in the lab I didn't really expect it to actually do anything. When we found that it could actually disrupt and kill cells in S. aureus biofilms, I was genuinely amazed. Biofilms are naturally antibiotic resistant and difficult to treat so this was a great result. The fact that it works on an organism that it was apparently designed to treat (an infection of a stye in the eye) suggests that people were doing carefully planned experiments long before the scientific method was developed.”