A paediatrician’s love of orchids led to the discovery that big doses of garlic could triumph over infection, writes Michael Nurok
The Roman statesman Cicero advised that one should eat to live, not live to eat. Little did he know that more than 2 000 years later, gravely ill patients at Cape Town hospitals might be doing just that. Doctors have been giving a special garlic extract to seriously infected children who have not responded to conventional treatment.
Perhaps more interesting is that this practice started as a result of a professor of paediatric surgery’s love of orchids.
More than 10 years ago, fungal infection was making it difficult for now-retired Professor Sidney Cywes, of the University of Cape Town, to hybridise orchid seeds. “Someone gave me a book which referred to the Egyptians using garlic,” he says.
Cywes successfully used the technique to stop the orchid infection. He then conducted a more formal experiment in the laboratory in which he found that a garlic extract inhibited the growth of the yeast candida.
Some time after this, the professor learned of a baby extremely ill with a candida infection. Conventional treatment had been exhausted and the child’s condition was not improving. Cywes and colleagues added the garlic extract to the child’s treatment. Soon after, the baby’s condition improved.
Subsequently garlic has been successfully used as a last resort for severe fungal and bacterial infections at various hospitals, including the Red Cross Children’s, Mowbray Maternity, Somerset and Tygerberg.
The garlic extract is manufactured by Peter de Wet, chief paediatric surgery research technologist at Red Cross Children’s hospital. The active ingredient is a substance called “allicin” that binds an enzyme necessary for metabolism in micro-organisms. “Allicin is not normally present in garlic, but its precursors are. The process of creating the extract brings the two precursors together,” says De Wet.
Patients receive the equivalent of roughly a bulb and a half of garlic each day. The extract is given orally as a liquid. “Allicin is not very stable so the children require four hourly doses, usually for five to seven days,” De Wit says.
Clinicians who have used the extract say the children smell strongly of garlic.
Cywes notes “the use of garlic is not new”. Its beneficial effect has been suggested for centuries.
Currently, there is ongoing research using garlic for cardiovascular disorders, cancer, and infections. In the laboratory, garlic extracts have been shown to inhibit the growth of 23 micro-organisms. But to date, there has been little clinical use of the pungent plant.
All involved are quick to point out the difficulty in proving that garlic indeed works. So far, all patients that have received the extract have been on maximal medical treatment using very potent anti-infective drugs. Garlic has been added as a last resort when conventional treatment isn’t working. So, when the patients have improved, it has been impossible to state whether it’s the garlic or the high-powered drugs that are working. Anecdotally, patients do seem to get better after receiving garlic.
In order to prove that garlic is responsible for the cure, trials will need to be designed to see whether patients receiving garlic alone improve. The problem is that it is unethical to withhold conventional treatment in exchange for one still considered experimental.
University of Cape Town Professor Heinz Rode who, along with De Wet, is carrying forward the garlic research, is emphatic that future trials will “first be approved by an ethical committee, and will use strict research protocols”.
The first trials will involve children who have received conventional therapy that has failed. If these prove scientifically successful, future trials may attempt to use the garlic extract alone.
Beyond its medical interest, this research may also treat an ailing health budget. Established antibiotics used to treat drug-resistant organisms are orders of magnitude, more expensive than medication used to treat drug-susceptible infections.
For example, a single dose of imipenem – a powerful antibiotic used in cases of drug- resistance – costs roughly 100 times more than standard penicillin. As drugs are used more and more, resistance to them increases.
Alarmingly, some organisms are becoming resistant to even the last-resort antibiotics like imipenem. The result is an increase in severe infections, requiring longer periods of hospitalisation, and the use of expensive big-gun antibiotics.
If trials prove the garlic extract successful, the need to use expensive last-resort antibiotics may be diminished. Patients who previously required these drugs may be treated at the cost of a few bulbs of garlic.
And all this, the result of a surgeon’s love of orchids.