Study Suggests Green Tea Helps Beat Superbugs by Society for General Microbiology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS
Green tea can help beat superbugs according to Egyptian
scientists speaking today (Monday 31 March 2008) at the Society for
General Microbiology's 162nd meeting being held this week at the
Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
The pharmacy researchers have shown that drinking green tea
helps the action of important antibiotics in their fight against
resistant superbugs, making them up to three times more
effective.
Green tea is a very common beverage in Egypt, and it is quite
likely that patients will drink green tea while taking antibiotics.
The medical researchers wanted to find out if green tea would
interfere with the action of the antibiotics, have no effect, or
increase the medicines' effects.
"We tested green tea in combination with antibiotics against 28
disease causing micro-organisms belonging to two different
classes," says Dr Mervat Kassem from the Faculty of Pharmacy at
Alexandria University in Egypt. "In every single case green tea
enhanced the bacteria-killing activity of the antibiotics. For
example the killing effect of chloramphenicol was 99.99% better
when taken with green tea than when taken on its own in some
circumstances."
Green tea also made 20% of drug-resistant bacteria susceptible
to one of the cephalosporin antibiotics. These are important
antibiotics that new drug resistant strains of bacteria have
evolved to resist.
The results surprised the researchers, showing that in almost
every case and for all types of antibiotics tested, drinking green
tea at the same time as taking the medicines seemed to reduce the
bacteria's drug resistance, even in superbug strains, and increase
the action of the antibiotics. In some cases, even a low
concentration of green tea was effective.
"Our results show that we should consider more seriously the
natural products we consume in our everyday life," says Dr Kassem.
"In the future, we will be looking at other natural herb products
such as marjoram and thyme to see whether they also contain active
compounds which can help in the battle against drug resistant
bacteria".
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