The
superbug, which is resistant to conventional antibiotics because of
their overuse, shrugs at even the deadliest weapons modern medicine
offers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated MRSA
contributed to the deaths of more than 5,000 people in the United States
in 2013. It even attacked the NFL, and some say it could eventually kill more people than cancer. And presidential commissions have advised that technological progress is the only way to fight MRSA.
But
researchers in the United Kingdom now report that the superbug proved
vulnerable to an ancient remedy. The ingredients? Just a bit of garlic, some onion or leek, copper, wine and oxgall — a florid name for cow’s bile.
This medicine sounds yucky, but it’s definitely better than the bug it may be able to kill.
“We
were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of
ingredients was,” Freya Harrison of the University of Nottingham, who
worked on the research, told the BBC.
The
oxgall remedy, billed as an eye salve, was found in a manuscript
written in Old English from the 10th century called “Bald’s Leechbook” —
a sort of pre-Magna Carta physician’s desk reference. Garlic and copper
are commonly thought to have antibiotic or antimicrobial properties,
but seeing such ingredients in a home remedy at Whole Foods is a far cry
from researchers killing a superbug with it.
According
to Christina Lee, an associate professor in Viking studies
at Nottingham, the MRSA research was the product of conversations among
academics of many stripes interested in infectious disease and how
people fought it before antibiotics.
“We were talking about the
specter of antibiotic resistance,” she told The Washington Post in a
phone interview. The medical researchers involved in the discussions
said to the medievalists: “In your period, you guys must have had
something.”
Not every recipe in Bald’s Leechbook is a gem. Other advice, via a translation from the Eastern Algo-Saxonist:
“Against a woman’s chatter; taste at night fasting a root of radish,
that day the chatter cannot harm thee.” And: “In case a man be a
lunatic; take skin of a mereswine or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man therewith, soon he will be well. Amen.”
Though the Leechbook may include misses, it may help doctors find a solution to a problem that only seems to be getting worse.
If
the oxgall remedy proves effective against MRSA outside of the lab —
which researchers caution it may not — it would be a godsend. Case
studies of MRSA’s impact from the CDC’s charmingly named Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report seem medieval.
“In
July 1997, a 7-year-old black girl from urban Minnesota was admitted to
a tertiary-care hospital with a temperature of 103 F.” Result: Death
from pulmonary hemorrhage after five weeks of hospitalization.
“In
January 1998, a 16-month-old American Indian girl from rural North
Dakota was taken to a local hospital in shock and with a temperature of
105.2 F.” Result: After respiratory failure and cardiac arrest, death
within two hours of hospital admission.
“In
January 1999, a 13-year-old white girl from rural Minnesota was brought
to a local hospital with fever, hemoptysis” — that’s coughing up blood —
“and respiratory distress.” The result: Death from multiple organ
failure after seven days in the hospital.
“We believe
modern research into disease can benefit from past responses and
knowledge, which is largely contained in non-scientific writings,” Lee
told the Telegraph.
“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.”
Lee stressed that it was the combination
of ingredients that proved effective against MRSA — which shows that
people living in medieval times were not as barbaric as popularly
thought. Even 1,000 years ago, when people got sick, other people tried
to figure out how to help.
“We associate ‘medieval’ with dark, barbaric,” Lee said. “… It’s not. I’ve always believed in the pragmatic medieval ages.”
The research will be presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology in Birmingham. In an abstract for the conference, the team cautioned oxgall was no cure-all.
“Antibacterial
activity of a substance in laboratory trials does not necessarily mean
the historical remedy it was taken from actually worked in toto,” they wrote.
Lee
said researchers hope to turn to other remedies in Bald’s Leechbook —
including purported cures for headaches and ulcers — to see what other
wisdom the ancients have to offer.
“At a time when you don’t have
microscope, medicine would have included things we find rather odd,”
she said. “In 200 years, people will judge us.”
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AscensionEarth2012/~3/qcp2SdLITQI/mrsa-attacks-human-cell.html
MRSA superbug killed by 1,100-year-old home remedy, researchers say
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