Potent potion from the past
MRSA is nothing to be trifled with. The “superbug” is now responsible for more deaths than AIDS in the United States, and it has proven highly resistant to typical antibiotic treatments. That has left doctors and researchers scrambling for something – anything – with which to fight back, and one potential weapon they’ve found is fairly astounding.
Folks at the University of Nottingham in England came across a 10th-century recipe for “eyesalve” in a volume of Bald’s Leechbook, which a CNN report describes as “one of the earliest known medical textbooks.”
The salve potion calls for taking, among other things, garlic, wine and ox bile, and brewing the mixture in a brass pot.
University researchers cooked up a batch, tested it and – lo and behold – it kicked MRSA’s behind.
“We found that Bald’s eyesalve is incredibly potent as an anti-Staphylococcal antibiotic in this context,” said Nottingham microbiologist Freya Harrison. “We were going from a mature, established population of a few billion (MRSA) cells … to really just a few thousand cells left alive. This is a massive, massive killing ability.”
More testing is needed, of course, and we’re not suggesting that you start rifling through your grandparents’ effects for tins of Carter’s Little Liver Pills or read up on bloodletting, but this shows that just because something is old or odd, it doesn’t mean it won’t work.