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The increasing risk of drug resistant superbug infections have been the focus of attention over the last several months as major hospitals such as UCLA report patient infections, and other health organizations are calculating what might occur should no new antibiotic be developed to combat these infections. The predicted costs to the economy and to the insurance industry are expected to be substantial. One of the several superbugs is MRSA or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Now, as strange as it may seem, a story published in Forbes and other major news media today reports that a 1,200-year-old Anglo-Saxon remedy called Bald’s Eye Salve has proven “astonishingly” effective in battling the MRSA superbug, which kills more than 5,000 people a year in the US. The potion, composed of garlic, onion or leeks, wine, and ox bile, kills up to 90 per cent of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in mice, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham.

The Mediaeval treatment was rediscovered by Christina Lee, an associate professor who specializes in disease and disability in the Anglo-Saxon and Viking eras, who translated it from old English. The one thousand year old Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections which originates from a manuscript in the British Library has been found to kill the modern-day superbug MRSA in an unusual research collaboration at The University of Nottingham.

Dr Lee, an Anglo-Saxon expert from the School of English has enlisted the help of microbiologists from University’s Centre for Biomolecular Sciences to recreate a 10th century potion for eye infections from Bald’s Leechbook an Old English leatherbound volume in the British Library, to see if it really works as an antibacterial remedy. The Leechbook is widely thought of as one of the earliest known medical textbooks and contains Anglo-Saxon medical advice and recipes for medicines, salves and treatments.

Early results on the ‘potion’, tested in vitro at Nottingham and backed up by mouse model tests at a university in the United States, are, in the words of the US collaborator, “astonishing”. The solution has had remarkable effects on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) which is one of the most antibiotic-resistant bugs costing modern health services billions.

The recipe, including detailed instructions on how long to chill the ingredients (nine days at 4C), was found in the leather-bound medical textbook from the 9th Century held in the British Library. “Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections,” said Dr Lee.

Microbiologists recreated Bald’s Eye Salve as faithfully as possible, even using a wine from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury, and tested it both in vitro and on wounds in mice. They compared the results to those achieved previously with the individual ingredients. “We thought that Bald’s eye salve might show a small amount of antibiotic activity, because each of the ingredients has been shown by other researchers to have some effect on bacteria in the lab,” said microbiologist Freya Harrison. “We were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was.”

Although developed long before the formal scientific method emerged, such remedies could have benefited from extensive trial-and-error research to determine what worked best. Many other books survive from the period with other treatments that might be similarly effective, Dr Lee said. A global hunt for new weapons against antibiotic-resistant infections was launched last year, spearheaded by British Prime Minister David Cameron. The results of the research on Bald’s Eye Salve were presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology, in Birmingham yesterday.