Medieval Medicine Remedy Could Provide New Treatment for Modern Day Infections

martyb writes:

Medieval medicine remedy could provide new treatment for modern day infections:

Antibiotic resistance is an increasing battle for scientists to overcome, as more antimicrobials are urgently needed to treat biofilm-associated infections. However scientists from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick say research into natural antimicrobials could provide candidates to fill the antibiotic discovery gap.

Bacteria can live in two ways, as individual planktonic cells or as a multicellular biofilm. Biofilm helps protect bacteria from antibiotics, making them much harder to treat, one such biofilm that is particularly hard to treat is those that infect diabetic foot ulcers.

[...] Building on previous research done by the University of Nottingham on using medieval remedies to treat MRSA, the researchers from the School of Life Sciences at University of Warwick reconstructed a 1,000-year-old medieval remedy containing onion, garlic, wine, and bile salts, which is known as 'Bald's eyesalve', and showed it to have promising antibacterial activity. The team also showed that the mixture caused low levels of damage to human cells.

They found the Bald's eyesalve remedy was effective against a range of Gram-negative and Gram-positive wound pathogens in planktonic culture. This activity is maintained against the following pathogens grown as biofilms:

1. Acinetobacter baumanii-commonly associated with infected wounds in combat troops returning from conflict zones.
2. Stenotrophomonas maltophilia-commonly associated with respiratory infections in humans
3. Staphylococcus aureus-a common cause of skin infections including abscesses, respiratory infections such as sinusitis, and food poisoning.
4. Staphylococcus epidermidis-a common cause of infections involving indwelling foreign devices such as a catheter, surgical wound infections, and bacteremia in immunocompromised patients.
5. Streptococcus pyogenes-causes numerous infections in humans including pharyngitis, tonsillitis, scarlet fever, cellulitis, rheumatic fever and post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis.

All of these bacteria can be found in the biofilms that infect diabetic foot ulcers and which can be resistant to antibiotic treatment. These debilitating infections can lead to amputation to avoid the risk of the bacteria spreading to the blood to cause lethal bacteremia.

Journal Reference:
Jessica Furner-Pardoe, Blessing O. Anonye, Ricky Cain, et al. Anti-biofilm efficacy of a medieval treatment for bacterial infection requires the combination of multiple ingredients [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-69273-8)

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