In the years to come, we may not have the ability to treat many of the infections that we could have overcome because of bacterial resistance to more advanced antibiotic drugs.
After drug resistance is expected to cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050, scientists are trying to find alternatives to antibiotics.
According to a CNN report, a team of British researchers found some hope in an unexpected location, a medieval manuscript.
A new research, published this week, indicated that a thousand-year-old natural remedy consisting of onions, garlic and bile salts showed antibacterial potential, with a promising hope in treating foot and diabetic infections.
The researchers said that the treatment known as "Bald's eyesalve" has the ability to treat infection of the biological membranes, which are the communities of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, which makes treatment much more difficult.
The study estimates that biofilm infections cost the UK alone more than 1 billion pounds, or $ 1.3 billion, each year.
Medieval treatment was first identified as a potential auxiliary in the battle against superbugs, and the latest study in the journal Scientific Reports shed more light on how it works and how it can be applied in practice.
Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the College of Life Sciences at Warwick University in the United Kingdom and author of the study, said: “We believe he has promising hope for specifically treating diabetic foot infection, and it is a super-resistant and highly resistant biofilm infection. They constitute a huge health and economic burden. It may become untreatable. ”
And Harrison noted that there is a high risk that diabetic foot ulcers are completely resistant to any antibiotic treatment. Then there is the risk of developing septicemia ... and it ends up amputating the foot or lower leg.
The prescription "Bald's eyesalve" was among the prescriptions for medications, ointments, and treatments listed in the book "Bald's Leechbook", an ancient English book found in the British Library. It is one of the oldest known medical texts.
Harrison said that each ingredient in the recipe contained some antibacterial activity when tested in a test tube. The grouping of its elements makes sense.
"It also clearly targets bacterial infection, according to the description of symptoms listed in the book," Harrison added.
The recipe is made using garlic and onions from regular grocery stores or vegetable stores, while bile salts come from the stomach of cows.
The research project came by chance, after Harrison, passionate about medieval history, heard about the book.
Harrison collaborated with her former classmate Christina Lee, an old English specialist at the University of Nottingham, where she previously worked.
The combination of historical books and new treatments is not new, as artemisinin, the malaria drug derived from wormwood, was discovered by a Chinese researcher, Tu Yoyo, after roaming ancient Chinese texts.
The strange thing is, Harrison said that the book "Bald's Leechbook" also contains a prescription for treating malaria using wormwood, which was endemic in parts of England in the early Middle Ages, noting that throughout that time, the treatment itself was written in an English text from The Middle Ages, but no one took it seriously.
Antibiotics are a supporter of modern medicine, and if they lose their effectiveness, medical procedures such as surgery and chemotherapy may become very dangerous.
Scientists say there are many different ways of new antibiotics and alternative therapies, which include daily items such as honey and vinegar, but also more obscure sources such as the blood of the Komodo dragons.
Other methods use viruses to target bacteria that have outperformed complex antibiotics.
One of the main findings of the study was that it was the natural product mix that gave Bald's eyesalve treatment its strong activity in fighting biofilms.
Harrison said the team is also testing the integrity of the mixture, and preliminary research is expected to publish that it has safe and promising results.
The next step will then be to chemically describe the mixture and begin testing the correction on human skin, but this step has been postponed due to the pandemic of the Coronavirus.
Harrison noted that the nature of studying a mixture of ingredients, rather than a single compound, can make the process of regulatory development and approval very time consuming.
Harrison said that next year, she hopes to have a better idea of ​​the safety of the treatment, and then they can say it is really effective, but that the process will take a long time.

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