Substances harvested from cannabis plants could soon outshine
conventional antibiotics in the escalating battle against drug-resistant
bacteria. The compounds, called cannabinoids, appear to be unaffected
by the mechanism that superbugs like MRSA use to evade existing
antibiotics. Scientists from Italy and the United Kingdom, who published
their research in the Journal of Natural Products last month, say that
cannabis-based creams could also be developed to treat persistent skin
infections.
Cannabis has long been known to have antibacterial properties and was
studied in the 1950s as a treatment for tuberculosis and other diseases.
But research into using cannabis as an antibiotic has been limited by
poor knowledge of the plant's active ingredients and by the controversy
surrounding its use as a recreational drug.
Now Giovanni Appendino of the Piemonte Orientale University, in Italy,
and Simon Gibbons of the School of Pharmacy at the University of London,
U.K., have revisited the antibiotic power of marijuana by
systematically testing different cannabinoids' ability to kill MRSA.
MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a
bacterium that can cause difficult-to-treat infections since it does not
respond to many antibiotics. Many healthy people carry S. aureus on
their skin, but problems arise when multi-drug-resistant strains infect
people with weak immune systems through an open wound. In the worst
cases, the bug spreads throughout the body, causing a life-threatening
infection.
To make matters worse, resistance to antibiotics is rapidly increasing,
and some strains are now even immune to vancomycin, a powerful
antibiotic that is normally used only as a last resort when other drugs
fail.
But when Appendino, Gibbons, and their colleagues applied extracts from
five major cannabinoids to bacterial cultures of six strains of MRSA,
they discovered that the cannabinoids were as effective at killing the
bugs as vancomycin and other antibiotics.....
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