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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.
"You won't believe what this weird thousand year old trick can do!..."
"You won't believe what happens when an ignorant guy reads this useful information!"
Try again, fucktard.
Did you mean: wikileeks
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Link
"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.
Killing MRSA is easy. Trivial, even. You can do it with steam, alcohol, or dozens of other disinfecting agents. The key is to be able to kill it inside an infected individual, without also killing the host (or damaging a significant amount of the host's tissues). That's why we use antibiotics in the first place. While it wasn't entirely clear from skimming TFA, it very much sounds like this is (currently, at least) only a topical treatment (i.e. it's applied to the skin). It might be superior to other modern topical treatments in some cases, but I personally doubt it.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Go read up on the likely and common side effects of:
1) Vancomycin - fucks up your kidneys at levels above 10 micrograms/mL (.1 grams / liter)
2) Untreated MRSA - fucks you up, as in dead.
3) Copper - 2 mg/Liter is considered the "safe" level in your drinking water.
So yeah, copper CAN fuck you up... but so can vancomycin, and vancomycin does so at much lower concentrations.
As far as the other ingredients - leeks, garlic and wine may make your breath a little potent for a while, but people eat that shit daily, and love it.
Given that MRSA is also *frequently* a skin infection, the route of topical treatment is also a great motherfucking idea, Einstein. And the fact that skin treated with Vancomycin and this remedy had comparable levels of reduction in MRSA load, no, it's NOT a stretch to say that it might be as effective as any modern remedy. In fact, it's kind of *exactly* as effective as modern remedies, based on this study.
Jesus fuck, just because you know Python doesn't mean you know the first fucking thing about biochemistry or medicine.
Staphylococcus Aureus, aka "Golden staph" is not exactly synonymous with MRSA. The MR part means 'Methicillin Resistant', which is a mutated form of SA that can't be killed with Methicillin, a common antibiotic. SA is extremely common - it's everywhere, all over your skin, right now. It's only dangerous if it starts to infect a wound and gets into the bloodstream. Most SA will still respond to antibiotics, only the MRSA strain won't. But this strain is still thankfully fairly rare, though it's a growing problem. One solution would be for everyone to stop taking antibiotics for minor ailments such as the common cold which it does nothing for, but adds a lot of unnecessary antibiotics to the environment, thus prompting common bacteria such as SA to evolve into the MRSA form. If we lose the benefit of antibiotics, it will be a disaster, and we can thank all the stupid people for that.
Consuming garlic on a regular basis will also keep mosquitoes away. I haven't been bit by one in years.
Your doctor doesn't want you to know aboyt this 500-year-old remedy for venereal disease.
Hint: it's mercury.
Not every old remedy is good for you. If you get into the history of medicine, you'll find lots of old remedies that are harmful.
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.
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
Don't forget brass is in that mix. A weird mix of both good and bad.
The copper in brass is germicidal, the reference to the MRSA application is in this article, very impressive stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Now there might even be some reaction to this aspect of brass (probably the zinc in it?) Note this is conjecture on my part at this point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Regardless, this is very good news. All of the botanicals and other ingredients are probably serving as a vehicle to keep the brass from doing harm to the person - an example is getting a cut from a brass object which can be difficult to heal. I suspect they are hard at work on a injectable solution. 100 percent kill within 4 hours is amazing, although it might be hard to do inside the body, perhaps will take a day or two. Plus, it will be much harder to develop resistance to this.
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?
It's unfortunate, but confidence is inversely proportional to intelligence. We have a lot of folks in here that should actually be on Yahoo comment boards, because as soon as an article comes out, they are spewing their bullshit, buzzing around it like blowflies on a fresh wildebeest carcass.
And they hate absolutely everything.
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.
The trick is in DNA itself. Whilst it might seem huge and whole lot can be done, it can not do everything and every time it changes to succeed in one area it must expose a weakness in another area (only so much DNA available to carry the genetic program of on and offs and more importantly the follow up 'how turned up the DNA switch is' buried in the so called junk DNA). So that salve being a very complex arrangement of many simultaneous anti-biotic attacks, is affective because whilst many elements of it fail, other elements succeed. So you follow the same example in modern anti-biotics, rather than a single molecule, you target the infection with many smaller doses of mutually supporting molecules and while some fail, others working together succeed.
So you change the nature of anti-biotics to composite forms. The additional benefit, is not only will you increase efficacy but you should substantially reduce side affects, unless you are really incompetent in creating suitable composite affect formulations. Likely the formulation will also work more rapidly, able to tackle various strains within an infection more readily.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"Then, they do even MORE lab tests to determine if the mechanism of action can be delivered..."
You left out the primary reason for all this effort. Willow bark can't be patented. Without a patent it is useless to investors, who are the only people that matter.
Many drugs began as ordinary substances. They would remain so but for the power of the patent. The patent is a jealously guarded piece of property. Obviously no infringement can be tolerated, but it goes way beyond that.
Anyone trying to sell the original substance (which may have been used for centuries) will have to deal with the Food and Drug Administration (the enforcement arm of the food and drug manufacturers). There will be questions about the safety and/or efficacy of the formula. There will be questions about any health claims made for the substance. Labeling and packaging will be scrutinized. And though there is little money to be made with herbal or generic products, there can be huge costs when you go up against Big Pharma.
It isn't about helping patients in the USA, it's about money and lots of it.
...omphaloskepsis often...
NOT homeopathic!! This is apothicary!
Homeopathic-- Made of two root words. Homeo == Same, Pathos == causes illness.
Homeopathy is a very strongly disproven notion from ancient days that if you consumed small quantities of a pathogen, your body would be strengthened against it.
Apothicary is radically different. Apothicaries (western ones anyway) ammased remedies that were ancient even in the dark ages, because they had proven to be effective at treating illnesses, and some theories as to the mechanisms of their action were created, and new remedies compounded based on those theories. They lacked modern science, and lacked the modern understanding of germs, but apothicary medicine was a pretty rigorous discipline, as opposed to the philosophical wishy-washiness of homeopathy.
[Eastern apothicaries however, developed a kind of magical hoodoo nonsense, which still lingers to this day. There is no medicinal value in tiger penis. No. There. isnt. It's just meat.]