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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.

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @01:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @01:35PM (#166654)

    Yeah, why even drink anything other than water? </sarcasm>