A 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon ‘eye salve’ made from onion, garlic, wine and part of a cow’s stomach has been shown to wipe out 90 percent of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA. And it works better than modern antibiotics in both lab and mouse models.
The simple salve is more effective than modern antibiotics.
“We did not see this coming at all,” said microbiologist Freya Harrison, the lead researcher, in the press video below.
“We thought that Bald’s eye salve might show a small amount of antibiotic activity. … But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was,” she added in a press release.
To find out whether the ancient eye salve worked, they made the recipe as faithfully as possible – even using wine from a vineyard that existed back in the 9th Century – and then tested it against large MRSA cultures in the lab. They also tested each individual ingredient on its own against the superbugs, as well as a control solution.
Incredibly, they found that the eye salve killed up to 90 percent of MRSA bacteria, but only when all the ingredients were used together.
Keen to try the Bald’s eye salve? You can make your own topical treatment by following the recipe, kindly translated by the BBC, below.
Bald’s eye salve
– Equal amounts of garlic and another allium (onion or leek), finely chopped and crushed in a mortar for two minutes.
– Add 25ml (0.87 fl oz) of English wine – in this case, taken from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury.
– Dissolve bovine salts in distilled water, add and then keep chilled for nine days at 4 degrees Celsius before straining through a cloth to remove particulates.
