At the Society for General Microbiology's 162nd meeting in Edinburgh the other day, Dr M. Kassem said the research she has been working on has demonstrated antibiotics are far more effective when taken in conjunction with green tea. Her studies analyzed the effect of this combination in fighting more than 28 disease-causing micro-organisms.
NutraIngredients, reporters for the healthy beverage industry, interviewed these scientists immediately, as green tea is such a popular beverage in Egypt. Researchers there sought to determine if it had any positive or negative effect on the effectiveness of antibiotics to fight disease, and were pleasantly surprised at how strong the positive effects were in their study (now under peer-review). Future publication will likely be in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases and the work apparently shows the potential of green tea to reduce antibiotic dosage.
Different classes of antibiotics were tested separately and in combination with green tea against strains of many nasty bugs. Green tea enhanced the bactericidal activity of all tested antibiotics.
"In every case green tea enhanced the bacteria-killing activity of the antibiotics," said Dr Kassem in the NutraIngredients interview. Kassem is from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Alexandria University in Egypt. "For example, the killing effect of chloramphenicol was 99.99 per cent better when taken with green tea than when taken on its own in some circumstances."
It sounds like I'm going to be drinking a healthy quantity of green tea whenever I am next prescribed an antibiotic.
Dave
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