Ancient Nubian Antibiotics

[kenndo]

Ancient Nubian Antibiotics

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Inspired by George Ayittey's book 'Africa Unchained'.


MSNBC reports:



While the modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin, the new findings suggest that people knew how to fight infections much earlier than that — even if they didn't actually know what bacteria were.
Some of the first people to use antibiotics, according to the research, may have lived along the shores of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia, which spans the border of modern Egypt and Sudan.
"Given the amount of tetracycline there, they had to know what they were doing," said lead author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."

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Ancient Nubians drank beer laced with antibiotics
Tetracycline found in bones of 2,000-year-old mummies


Image: Tetracycline residue
Emory

The yellow film in the laboratory flask represents tetracycline residue extracted from dissolved bones. Scientists say the analysis shows that ancient Nubians regularly consumed tetracycline, most likely in their beer.
By Emily Sohn
updated 9/3/2010 12:36:02 PM ET 2010-09-03T16:36:02


People have been using antibiotics for nearly 2,000 years, suggests a new study, which found large doses of tetracycline embedded in the bones of ancient African mummies.

What's more, they probably got it through beer, and just about everyone appears to have drank it consistently throughout their lifetimes, beginning early in childhood.

While the modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin, the new findings suggest that people knew how to fight infections much earlier than that — even if they didn't actually know what bacteria were.

Some of the first people to use antibiotics, according to the research, may have lived along the shores of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia, which spans the border of modern Egypt and Sudan.

"Given the amount of tetracycline there, they had to know what they were doing," said lead author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."

Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline — an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.

At first, he assumed that some kind of contamination had occurred.


"Imagine if you're unwrapping a mummy, and all of a sudden, you see a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses on it," Armelagos said. "Initially, we thought it was a product of modern technology."

His team's first report about the finding, bolstered by even more evidence and published in Science in 1980, was met with lots of skepticism. For the new study, he got help dissolving bone samples and extracting tetracycline from them, clearly showing that the antibiotic was deposited into and embedded within the bone, not a result of contamination from the environment.

The analyses also showed that ancient Nubians were consuming large doses of tetracycline -- more than is commonly prescribed today as a daily dose for controlling infections from bad acne. The team reported their results in theAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology.

They were also able to trace the antibiotic to its source: Grain that was contaminated with a type of mold-like bacteria called Streptomyces. Common in soil, Strep bacteria produce tetracycline antibiotics to kill off other, competing bacteria.

Grains that are stored underground can easily become moldy with Streptomyces contamination, though these bacteria would only produce small amounts of tetracycline on their own when left to sit or baked into bread. Only when people fermented the grain would tetracycline production explode. Nubians both ate the fermented grains as gruel and used it to make beer.

The scientists are working now to figure out exactly how much tetracycline Nubians were getting, but it appears that doses were high that consumption was consistent, and that drinking started early. Analyses of the bones showed that babies got some tetracycline through their mother's milk.

Then, between ages two and six, there was a big spike in antibiotics deposited in the bone, Armelagos said, suggesting that fermented grains were used as a weaning food.

Today, most beer is pasteurized to kill Strep and other bacteria, so there should be no antibiotics in the ale you order at a bar, said Dennis Vangerven, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

But Armelagos has challenged his students to home-brew beer like the Nubians did, including the addition of Strep bacteria. The resulting brew contains tetracycline, tastes sour but drinkable, and gives off a greenish hue.

There's still a possibility that ancient antibiotic use was an accident that the Nubians never knew about, though Armelagos has also found tetracycline in the bones of another population that lived in Jordan. And VanGerven has found the antibiotic in a group that lived further south in Egypt during the same period.

Finding tetracycline in these mummies, said VanGerven, was "surprising and unexpected. And at the very least, it gives us a very different time frame in which to understand the dynamic interaction between the bacterial world and the world of antibiotics."

© 2012 Discovery Channel
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http://africaunchained.blogspot.com/...tibiotics.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38990966/

[lady gaga]

Nice

[Zoola]

Ancient Nubians .. those are my people I heard reflexology belongs to us and not the Chinese.

[kenndo]

Ancient Nubians, Antibiotics and Beer
You may have heard that among the many talents of ancient peoples was the art of brewing beer. What you might not know is that an ancient Nubian brew appears to have the ability to fight off bacterial infections. That's right, antibiotics in beer.


Courtesy of Meganhassler

Bioanthropologist George Armelagos made his way to this discovery by first noting the presence of the antibiotic tetracycline in Nubian skeletons from 350-550 A.D. Collaboration with the medical chemist Mark Nelson led to the conclusion that tetracycline was not merely present in Nubian bones, but their bones were chock-full of tetracycline.

Tetracycline is produced by bacteria in the Streptomyces genus. It is an antibiotic, which means that Streptomyces produces it for defense from its more pathogenic compatriots. Antibiotics in humans have the same role as they're used to kill pathogenic bacteria. About two-thirds of the naturally-derived antibiotics used in medicine today come from Streptomyces, including tetracycline which is currently used as a treatment for skin, genitial, urinary and digestive infections. Assumedly it would have prevented against similar infections in ancient times.

Armelagos and his colleagues traced the high presence of tetracycline in Nubian bones back to their practice of drinking beer. Streptomyces primarily grows in soil so it is possible that the grain they used eat and brew beer had accidental colonies on it, which carried into the finished product. However, accidental contamination of bread or beer with Streptomyces would not produce the high levels they found in the skeletons; Armelagos and company inferred that Nubians consciously added Streptomyces colonies to their beer.

(As an interesting side-note, the antibiotic properties of Streptomycetes are still being investigated as we did a lab on them in Microbiology here at Allegheny)

Conscious addition implies that Nubians recognized the benefits of tetracycline and capitalized on them. This recognition would require some solid ancient science but it could be helped along by the fact that many strands of Streptomyces form golden colonies, a color and substance that was (and still is) much adored. In fact when tetracycline was discovered in the US in 1948 it was named "auereomycin", where the word aerous is Latin for 'containing gold'. Ancient Nubians may have seen golden colonies, associated them with good fortune and added them to their beer (which at this time was a thick, nutritious drink that all ages enjoyed). When stomach pain and other aliments decreased after drinking beer supplemented with these golden colonies, the colonies would have been considered miraculous and their addition would have become standard.

Every time I learn more about ancient peoples I am more impressed. To think, people 1500 years before us used antibiotics in nearly the same way we do now- it's remarkable! Ancient Nubians may deserve a footnote on all of those pages of thanks to Alexander Fleming.

http://factualenquirer.blogspot.com/...-and-beer.html