The key to killing methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- also known as MRSA or golden staph -- may not be new-fangled treatments after all, but a treatment for an infected eyelash follicle found in a 1,000-year-old book.
The MRSA "superbug" is notoriously difficult to treat. Over the years, it developed resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics, which include common treatments like penicillin and its derivatives, cephalosporins, monobactams and carbapenems. It's also a particular problem in hospitals and nursing homes, where a high percentage of the population of which have open wounds and weakened immune systems.
Although new remedies, consisting of other drugs and antibiotics, are found and used, it is never long before newer strains of the bacteria emerge with new resistances to the treatments.
So the recipe -- taken from "Bald's Leechbook," one of the oldest known examples of a medical textbook --astonished researchers at the University of Nottingham when it killed up to 90 percent of MRSA bacteria in a laboratory setting.
The team decided to test the recipe -- consisting of garlic, leek, wine and bovine bile salts -- after microbiologist Dr Freya Harrison got talking with Anglo Saxon scholar Dr Christina Lee about the recipe. It reads as follows:
"Work and eye salve for a wen, take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with a leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time apply with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom."
The team used leeks and garlic, hoping that they were similar enough to the leeks and garlic that were around 1,000 years ago, some organic vintage wine from a historic English vineyard, and bovine bile salts usually used to treat humans who have had their gall bladders removed. Instead of a brass vessel, which would have been difficult to sterilise, they used glass bottles, including squares of brass in with the mixture -- copper is known to kill bacteria.
