What an amazing discovery! (But who came up with the idea - and the money - to try it?) I mean, these folks have time on their hands. Brilliant, though. But it does make one wonder... I mean, clearly it is worth testing, but how many things were tested that resulted in no help? So, did Dr. Lee run to a microbiologist and say, "Hey, let's try this?" Or did Prime Minister Cameron call up Dr. Lee and say: "Hey, I was reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and I got this great idea for something we should try..."
This discovery also makes me think about our food and what we are doing to it. I mean, if we had started to generically modify our garlic would this no longer have been the case? It is funny-interesting that they used wine from a historic vineyard. Would any wine do? Would all our clones of wine grapes work?
I read that some of the only food we have not modified are our herbs because we cultivated those herbs because we valued the taste of the herbs, but many other plants, like spinach and such, have been bred to remove much of their inherent bitterness. That today's cilantro is very close to "ancient" (that might not be the right word) cilantro. Interesting to contemplate.
And, of course, we must ask ourselves if the engineered or bred foods are actually better at healing. I mean, as mentioned in my little blurb about God and chicken, maybe the changes we are making are better. This article doesn't mention if they tried this recipe with modern supermarket bought ingredients.
So, could Dr. Christina Lee be a cousin?
A 1,200-year-old Anglo-Saxon remedy called Bald’s Eye Salve has proven “astonishingly” effective in battling the MRSA superbug, which kills more than 5,000 people a year in the US.
The potion, composed of garlic, onion or leeks, wine, and ox bile, kills up to 90 per cent of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in mice, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham.
The Mediaeval treatment was rediscovered by Christina Lee, an associate professor who specialises in disease and disability in the Anglo-Saxon and Viking eras, who translated it from old English.
The recipe, including detailed instructions on how long to chill the ingredients (nine days at 4C), was found in Bald’s Leechbook, a leather-bound medical textbook from the 9th Century held in the British Library.
BaldsLeechbook
A page from Bald’s Leechbook (Credit: university of Nottingham/British Library)
“Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections,” said Dr Lee.
Microbiologists recreated Bald’s Eye Salve as faithfully as possible, even using a wine from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury, and tested it both in vitro and on wounds in mice.
They compared the results to those achieved previously with the individual ingredients.
“We thought that Bald’s eye salve 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. “We were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was.
“We tested it in difficult conditions too,” Dr Harrison told IBT. “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.”
Although developed long before the formal scientific method emerged, such remedies could have benefitted from extensive trial-and-error research to determine what worked best.
Many other books survive from the period with other treatments that might be similarly effective, Dr Lee said.
A global hunt for new weapons against antibiotic-resistant infections was launched last year, spearheaded by British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Rand Europe and KPMG calculated that, unchecked, superbugs by 2050 kill 300 million people, more than cancer, and cost the global economy US$1tr.
The population loss alone would cut world economic output by 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent, the report said.
The results of the research on Bald’s Eye Salve were presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology, in Birmingham yesterday.
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