How a weird medieval recipe is fighting superbugs

Medieval medicine doesn’t have a great reputation, it’s fair to say. But one of its recipes may help us tackle the great curse of 21st-century disease control – the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics.

In April 2014, the World Health Organisation warned that we were entering a ‘post-antibiotic era’, an age in which drug resistance could render routine infections deadly. We do seem to be entering this age rapidly; the news is relentless. Now the US Centres for Disease Control are warning that a multidrug-resistant strain of food poisoning, the eerily named Shigella, has reached American shores from abroad.

Indeed, physicians and scientists are surprised at how quickly pathogens have been adapting to the so-called antibiotics of last resort, including a class of drugs called carbapenems.

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