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Old Anglo-Saxon remedy kills hospital super-bug MRSA

Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together… take wine and bullocks gall, mix with the leek… let it stand nine days in the brass vessel…” The simple recipe, inscribed in a 10th-century manuscript called Bald’s Leechbook, was found in the British Library.

Bard’s Leechbook is widely believed to be one of the earliest known medical textbooks in existence, and contains many recipes for salves, ointments and treatments. One recipe, called “Bard’s eyesalve,” was a treatment for an infected eyelash follicle, or what we commonly call a stye.

Associate Professor Dr Christina Lee, of the University of Nottingham, was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying: “Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections – weeping wounds and sores, eye and throat infections, skin conditions such as the erysipelas rash, leprosy and chest infections.”

After talking with an Anglo-Saxon scholar, Dr. Nottingham was intrigued enough over some of the recipes found in the leechbook that a project was formed. Academics from the university, who translated the recipe for Bard’s eyesalve thought the project was a “zany idea.”

While it was discovered that some of the ingredients in the recipe, such as copper from the brass vessel, killed bacteria in a culture grown in a petri dish, it really wasn’t known if the combination of ingredients would work on a real infection, or even how they would combine.

The necessity to follow the recipe is very important
Freya Harrison, the microbiologist who mixed the concoction said it was a real challenge getting authentic ingredients, particularly the leeks and garlic. Modern varieties, even those called “heritage” crops are so different from the crops grown 1,000 years ago. For the wine, a vintage organic variety from a historic English vineyard was used.

Rather than use a “brass vessel,” which could be hard to sterilize as well as being very expensive, the microbiologists used glass bottles with square sheets of brass immersed in the mixture. The “bullocks gall” was easy to find because cow’s bile salts are sold as a supplement for people who have had their gall bladders removed.

It was important to mix the ingredients just as the recipe recommended, equally, mixing the wine and bile with the vegetables and then letting the mixture steep for nine days.

The first thing the team noticed after the nine-day period was over was that the potion had killed off all the soil bacteria, making it “self-sterilizing.” Harrison says, “That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use.”

The potion was first tested on scraps of skin from mice infected with methicillin-resistant [iStaphylococcus aureus or MRSA. The team was amazed to find the potion killed 90 percent of the bacteria. Just to be sure of their results,

Vancomycin was also tested against the skin scraps and also killed 90 percent of the MRSA bacteria. They even tested the potion against a dense bacterial culture, where the bacteria create “biofilms,” but unlike most modern antibiotics, “Bald’s eye salve has the power to breach these defenses,” said Harrison.

The most interesting thing discovered was that unless the ingredients were mixed together in the exact proportions, they didn’t work at all. “The big challenge is trying to find out why that combination works,” says Steve Diggle, another of the researchers. This raises the question of how they work. Do they work together in harmony, or do they combine to form a more potent ingredient as yet to be discovered?

There is a good lesson to be learned from this, and it is that ancient texts on medicine should not be overlooked in discovering remedies for diseases. This is not the first time we have looked back to ancient text’s for help. The antimalarial drug artemisinin was found after looking through ancient Chinese manuscripts.

The results of this research will be presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology in Birmingham, UK, being held from March 30 through April 2.

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We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of our dear friend Karen Graham, who served as Editor-at-Large at Digital Journal. She was 78 years old. Karen's view of what is happening in our world was colored by her love of history and how the past influences events taking place today. Her belief in humankind's part in the care of the planet and our environment has led her to focus on the need for action in dealing with climate change. It was said by Geoffrey C. Ward, "Journalism is merely history's first draft." Everyone who writes about what is happening today is indeed, writing a small part of our history.

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