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Thousand-Year-Old Eye Salve Kills MRSA
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at the University of Nottingham used a recipe from an ancient medical text to successfully kill golden staph bacteria, also known as MRSA, the superbug commonly found in hospitals. Bald's Leechbook calls for leeks, garlic, brass, wine and other ingredients to create an eye salve for curing an infected eyelash. The salve has been found to be effective in killing the MRSA at least as well any modern remedy.
It works "at least as well as any modern remedy."
And since modern remedies can't kill superbugs, we must assume this one can't either.
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"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Killing bugs is easy. It's not killing everything else in the vicinity that makes it hard.
That's why antibiotics were invented in the first place.
Only a lab test, yes.
And at one point, "chewing willow bark" was just a crazy home remedy, until a lab test discovered that willow bark contains salicin, which your body converts to salicylic acid... which is just un-acetylated aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid).
They test these things in labs, and discover that, "Hey, there's something to this that seems to work."
Then they do MORE lab tests, to discover the mechanism of action.
Then, they do even MORE lab tests to determine if the mechanism of action can be delivered in a way that is deadly to the microbe but NOT deadly to the infected person.
The interesting thing about this new concoction is that it is made from leeks, garlic, wine, and bile salts, none of which are necessarily toxic to a human (people who have had their gall bladder removed actually take bile salt supplements), and three of which are actually considered very tasty additions to many dishes we usually eat. That suggests that the active ingredient or mechanism might actually be helpful in humans. Contrast that with ingesting household bleach, which usually ends with you dead on the floor in a puddle of your own shit and piss, or applying chlorine bleach to an open wound infected with MRSA, which may not kill you, but certainly will leave chemical burns on top of your infection.
Why is it that people who fancy themselves SO goddamned smart have to sneer at every science article as if the results were obvious, clearly wrong, or deliberately misleading? For fuck's sake, stop trying to show off how smart you are - you're not that smart, and you're definitely not that amusing.
Really - should I quit even coming here for news? I haven't seen one item this week that wasn't on reddit for a day or more.
We took a poll, and everyone wanted you to stop coming here, and stay on reddit. Thanks for the fish.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
One person gets it. Wow.
The interesting part of this article is that this is a concoction that wouldn't ordinarily be thought of as an effective antibiotic. No one will be compounding leeks and garlic and prescribing it. Something interesting is occurring here. Once we discover what it is it could lead to some interesting new classes of drugs.
Its the copper and brass in the mixture. Copper is a germicide of some worth.The other stuff probably soothes the wound.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Luckily for doctors, MRSA is often a skin infection. So, even if this turns out to be "topical use only," maybe you put something like this on the wound site where the infection started, and you dose the patient with Vancomycin or other high-potency antibiotics to knock down anything internal - this might be a faster, more complete, and less detrimental regimen to use for a lot of people who end up with MRSA infections.
Heavy doses of vancomycin can fuck you up big time too, probably more so than a short, high dose of copper would; And it's possible that exposure to BOTH harmful compounds could be minimized by using them in a 'cocktail' form.
As far as being a new class of drugs - stranger things have happened. Allicin in garlic has also been found to have some antimicrobial properties, so it's entirely possible that there's some sort of interaction between the the many, many compounds undoubtedly in this brew, that intensify each other's effects, as well. And, to the original point - you don't have to chew willow bark to get the medicine from it anymore, we've learned how to synthesize a very pure and readily bio-available form of the active ingredient -- more research may find a way to combine the best parts of these treatments without needing you to coat your body in copper, leeks, garlic, bile, and wine anymore. Just because this is a primitive form, there's no reason to think we can't isolate and improve on the active ingredient(s) just as we have with literally every other medicine known to man.
We have a combination of hundreds of substances known to work topically with unknown side effects. There's a huge number of unanswered questions.
Which parts of the garlic are actually relevant? Yes, garlic is antiseptic, but do any of its components interact with other parts of the concoction? How does the wine play into this? Does this concoction have any long-term side effects? (After all, one of the active ingredients is a heavy metal.) What if it's used repeatedly? Does its behavior differ when used internally? Which parts need to be isolated in order to achieve maximum effectiveness with the minimum number of chemical compounds? (A more complex medication means more chances for people to be intolerant to some ingredient so a chemically simpler formulation actually has benefits.) Under which circumstances should this stuff not be used despite being otherwise indicated? Are there, for instance, any adverse interactions with other medications?
Can you answer any of those questions with certainty right now? I don't think so. You may think that this stuff isn't important but a doctor would want to know whether it's known-unsafe to use this stuff on a patient who is on medications A, B and C and suffers from known medical conditions D and E.
No, big pharma is not nice. But that doesn't mean that they are completely useless and just dick around with flawless medicines in order to make them more expensive. They do a lot of rather expensive testing to make reasonably sure that this stuff is actually safe to use and its failure modes are well-understood.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Well, in the rest of the world the M in MRSA does not stand for 'Methicillin' but for 'Multiple' as those bacteria are resistant against _multiple_ antibiotics.
If they only would be resistant against Methicillin, the treatment would be easy, a joke actually.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.