Thursday 20 October 2016

pharmacopoea

As we face a medical crisis that threatens to return health care to pre-industrial levels, researchers have been scouring the natural world for novel compounds that have not yet been overcome by anti-microbial resistance (here, read about how that dragnet might be extended with citizen science)—as even the most potent in our limited quiver of antibiotics have been vanquished due to our abuse and overuse. Scientists and care-takers in Australia have discovered that the milk of Tasmanian devils have six-fold the immunity boosters of human milk and can combat some of the most dread pathogens that linger in what ought to be the cleanest of places. I wonder if these carnivorous marsupials might one day be our salvation and it really punctuates the fact that we diminish any part and parcel of Nature at our peril, since who knows what’s already been lost.