As antibiotic-resistant bacteria become more common and more deadly, the solution to this relatively new problem may come from a bit of old Irish folklore and tradition.
Soil from an area of Northern Ireland once occupied by the Druids has long been believed to have almost miraculous curative powers.Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
“Countries still retain ethnic folk medicine and a lot of that medicine is forgotten. But here in the western fringes of Ireland there is still a tradition of having this folk cure,” Quinn told NBC News. “We can look at it and see maybe it's just superstition — or we can actually investigate and ask, 'is there anything in the soil that produces antibiotics?'"“A lot of the antibiotics we have now are so-called natural products,” said Dr.
“To put it in perspective, every year in the United States at least 23,000 people die from an antibiotic resistant infection," Coukell said."That’s like a jumbo jet crashing every week.” The researchers first tried the newly discovered strain of Streptomyces on some garden variety bacteria. In their petri dish experiment, “it knocked them out,” Quinn said. “Then we thought we’d take it one step further and find some multi-resistant organisms."The bacteria in the experiment killed four out of the top six organisms that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA.Quinn and his team described their experience in a study published last fall in Frontiers in Microbiology.
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