Garlic is 100 Times More Effective Than Two Popular Antibiotics

Experts now claim the growth of antibiotic resistant disease poses as great a threat to global health as Aids and pandemic flu from the dangerous overuse of antibiotics in farm animals.

Additionally, the threat of food-borne illnesses are on the rise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims salmonella food poisoning cases have increased by 10 percent.

Antibiotic resistant diseases and increased food-borne illnesses make recent findings on garlic from Washington State University all the more important. Studies show that garlic is 100 times more effective than two popular antibiotics at fighting disease causing bacteria commonly responsible for food-borne illness.

Their work was published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy a follow-up to the author's previous research in Applied and Environmental Microbiology which demonstrated that garlic concentrate was effective in inhibiting the growth of C. jejuni bacteria.

"This work is very exciting to me because it shows that this compound has the potential to reduce disease-causing bacteria in the environment and in our food supply," said Xiaonan Lu, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper.

"Prevent Disease" notes that in 1858, Louis Pasteur claimed bacteria died when they were doused with garlic. "From the Middle Ages on, garlic has been used to treat wounds, being ground or sliced and applied directly to wounds to inhibit the spread of infection. The Russians refer to garlic as Russian penicillin."

"This is the first step in developing or thinking about new intervention strategies," saif Michael Konkel, a co-author who has been researching Campylobacter jejuni for 25 years.

Konkel claims Campylobacter is the most common bacterial cause of food-borne illness in the United States and probably the world. The CDC claims 2.4 million Americans are affected every year with symptoms including diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain and fever.

Diallyl disulfide, a compound derived from garlic, is produced during the decomposition of allicin, which is released upon crushing garlic.

"Lu and his colleagues found the compound can easily penetrate the protective biofilm and kill bacterial cells. The researchers found the diallyl sulfide was as effective as 100 times as much of the antibiotics erythromycin and ciprofloxacin and often would work in a fraction of the time."