Seaweed benefits health with potential anti-biotic uses.
Our immune system operates as a very complex mechanism. Therefore, scientists spend years on researching and understanding how it works. A recent study shows that there is a massive overuse of antibiotics during the last century, which can be detrimental to our immune.
According to Dr. Peter D’Adamo, our immune system is meant to fight various bacterial infections while antibiotics are also designed to kill them. This leads to some of them becoming more resilient and our natural ability to resist them can become weaker.
Therefore, researchers from the European Centre for Environment & Human Health are now working on a new generation of powerful antibiotics and recent results are quite promising.
A leader of the research, Dr Michiel Vos believes that combining ecology and evolutionary biology is the fastest way to confirm another of seaweed’s benefits: antimicrobial characteristics.
Why seaweed could be the new cure?
It was found out that algae has antimicrobial properties. What is more, according to one of the experiments conducted by the University of Exeter, seaweed antibiotics are said to be able to fight MRSA infection (or ‘superbug’). It is quite dangerous as it is resistant to a wide range of antibiotics.
In order to discover more and make official claims, a special research project will be developed in the near future. The new study will seek to discover what kind of sea vegetables are the most effective when it comes to medical benefits. What is more, as the natural environment becomes increasing known as a rich source of ingredients for pharmaceutical industry, the University of Exeter study will also attempt to find a new cost-effective way of testing natural products.
Studying seaweed ingredients for clinical effects is not new. Almost ten years ago an algae extract was said to improve immune system response to the flu vaccine.
It goes without saying that the 2015 research may have incredible global implications!
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Dear Seaweed and Co, Please will you check who wrote this press release as unless I am mistaken you are confused about the difference between a virus causing infection and a bacterial one. Bacteria respond to antibiotics but viruses don’t. Please let me know if it is me that has become confused or yourselves. For someone who has to take a lot of antibiotics this is incredibly exciting news as there has been a lot of research undertaken in recent years looking at seaweeds antimicrobial qualities.
I have just checked this blog again against University of Exeter’s press release. They do not mention viral research at all but only microbial and use MRSA as an example. The Staph bug is a bacteria and not a virus. I know for a fact that they are also looking at other bugs like pseudomonas which is a bacteria not a virus. So unless you know something that is not in their press release I think you ought to alter this blog asap as you say in ‘what we do’ that you are an umbrella for many respected organisations that operate within the scientific community.
Thanks so much Nicola for reading our posts and also for putting us right!
I have updated properly, and rectified the error I hope.
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