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from the Emory-has-the-Devil's-Walking-Stick-on-campus?-This-explains-a-lot dept.
A study led by scientists at Emory Univeristy has shown that extracts from plants used in the South during the civil war have antimicrobial properties effective against several modern multi-drug resistant bacteria.
During the height of the Civil War, the Confederate Surgeon General commissioned a guide to traditional plant remedies of the South, as battlefield physicians faced high rates of infections among the wounded and shortages of conventional medicines. A new study of three of the plants from this guide -- the white oak, the tulip poplar and the devil's walking stick -- finds that they have antiseptic properties.
The antebellum antimicrobials, harvested right on campus, were found to be effective in testing against modern Acinetobacter baumannii, Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae
"Our findings suggest that the use of these topical therapies may have saved some limbs, and maybe even lives, during the Civil War," says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the paper and assistant professor at Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology.
The guide was named the "Standard supply table of the indigenous remedies for field service and the sick in general hospitals." and lists botanical names, dosages, and medical properties of various native southern plants.
Even so, amputation was a common treatment for infected wounds and one in 13 surviving Civil War soldiers went home missing one or more limbs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:50PM
One if the issues with drugs is that they often only use one compound at a time. Bacteria become immune to that one compound.
Many herbs may have several compounds that work together to make immunity more difficult. An herb may have a compound that inhibits an enzyme that the bacteria needs. The bacteria could then produce a modified enzyme but the herb may have another compound that also inhibits that modified enzyme too making immunity more difficult. Or the second compound may also attach to an allosteric site or inhibit a different important enzyme.
Drug manufacturers try to look for a 'silver bullet' but sometimes they should consider mixing multiple compounds together and running tests on compound mixtures that work together in different ways and have synergistic effects. I don't know why they don't do that. It's probably better than trying to use plants that have inconsistent chemical compositions and may not be formulated to produce a solution as effective as one formulated in a lab.
This could also be applied to cancer as well. Doctors take cancer cells and culture them on petri dishes and they try different drugs to see which one works the best. Then they give the patient the most promising drugs. The drug may wipe out most of the cancer cells but some cancer cells may be resistant to that drug. Those cancer cells will then proliferate and trying to cure them later could be difficult. However, a combination of multiple compounds working together might make immunity more difficult as the initial compound might eliminate most of the cancer cells while a second compound might eliminate the ones that are resistant to that initial compound if it were to be used with the first one to begin with.
Also the FDA may approve a drug that works against many cancers but all cancers are different and may be vulnerable to different compounds. Doctors and chemists should be allowed try 10 drugs on someone's cancer cell, see which one is most effective (using normal cells as a control to make sure they aren't damaged) and then to make slight modifications to the compound that's most effective to test against until they get a compound that's even more effective than the original.
So for instance they try drugs A, B, C, D and E.
They find that for your type of cancer (or infection) drug C works best. They then make slight modifications to C
C, C1, C2, C3, C4 and C5.
They try all of those (and they can make slight modifications to the composition of each solution as well if more than one active ingredients that work together are being used) and find the one that's most effective again.
It's C2. Give the patient C2.
It should be noted what needs to be compared is how harmful C2 is to the disease to how harmful it is to your native cells.
It should also be noted that you are in a race against time, it takes more time to discover that C2 is a better treatment than C but, in the meantime, the disease is still progressing. Doctors may give the patient C until they discover that C2 is a better treatment but subjecting the patient to C before C2 might give the disease time to immune to C which could give the disease some immunity to C2 by the time C2 does arrive (allowing the disease to further immune to C2).
The problem is that C2 is not FDA approved. Only C is FDA approved. So while C2 may be a better solution for this specific patient's condition since C2 is not approved, and approval takes years and costs a ton of money, the patient may only be able to receive C.
Much of that may have to do with patents? Trying to mix multiple drugs together might require obtaining multiple licenses which is expensive. Also the way the FDA approval process is structured makes it difficult as well. The FDA likes to approve compounds individually and it may not like the idea of approving a compound to be used with another compound.