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Medieval Remedy Kills Antibiotic-Resistant MRSA Superbugs

posted by CoolHand on Saturday April 04 2015, @02:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-there-is-something-to-old-witchcraft-potions-after-all dept.

jdccdevel writes:

The CBC has an article about a medieval recipe found in a 1,000-year-old book that can kill antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

The recipe's ingredients include: garlic, onion or leek, wine, and oxgall (bile from a cow's stomach). Oh, yeah, it's also supposed to be "brewed in a brass vessel, strained and then left to sit for nine days before use."

From the article:

A recipe for the potion, originally an eye salve, was found in Bald's Leechbok, a 10th-century book of Anglo-Saxon medical advice and recipes for medicines, salves and treatments found in the British Library.
...
When tested in mice on wounds infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), it performed at least as well as conventional antibiotics, reported scientists at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology this week in the United Kingdom.

"We were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was," Freya Harrison, the University of Nottingham microbiologist who led the study, said in a statement.

Apparently, this recipe is even effective against biofilms which modern antibiotics really struggle to combat.

More details from The University of Nottingham and BBC News.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2015, @04:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2015, @04:41AM (#166308)

    So it's snake oil unless some international pharmaceutical conglomerate is raping the public to make billions off it? Forms of medicine existed long before modern medicine. They may not have known why things worked, but that doesn't mean those methods didn't work. Chewing tree bark didn't provide any pain relief because it wasn't refined into aspirin yet? All those people for thousands of years must have been the first ones to experience the placebo effect.

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  • (Score: 2) by TLA on Sunday April 05 2015, @03:32PM

    by TLA (5128) on Sunday April 05 2015, @03:32PM (#166677) Journal

    This. Is why I keep a trained elder tree in the greenhouse. I don't do tablet painkillers or blood thinners because I have that, elder is about as useful as hemp (and it's completely legal, which is a plus).

    --
    Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander