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Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

I'm telling you, 10-20 years from now we're going to get garlic and onion resistant MRSA.

Hopefully it will be less efficient in other aspects. Adaptions like that tend to have costs. Even if not, even if it turns out to make it more efficient, we are buying 10-20 years. Lots of things can happen in that time.

Like companies outlawing growing your own garlic and onions because someone somewhere found that you can make a moderately effective mace with those ingredients, or because they can be abused (war on drugs), or because terrorists.

You might raise issue with the idea of a corporation outlawing something. I say look at the way the justice system currently works and tell me they couldnt buy the result they wanted.

Just in time for FDA "approval"!

This is the unfortunate reality.

Maybe, maybe not. Keep in mind that as a biological actor, garlic and other allicin-containing substances have the ability to adapt generationally to meet changes in bacteria. That's an advantage that is not innate to our own antibiotics.

Also, that allicin kills MRSA is not news by any measure. Here's an article from 2008:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/health/article127...

They don't just magically adapt because they are being used. To adapt they would have to be attacked by bacteria, and only the stronger ones survive, but MRSA doesn't attack onions.

They could adapt because humans only grow the ones that are the better of the batch at doing what we want them to do. I can't see it working as fast as bacteria, but it could be another option.

It seems like it should be at pretty much the same speed, if an equal size amount of garlic plants were being attacked by MRSA. Doesn't matter if natural selection of human-guided selection does the culling.

I suppose it might be expensive to grow lots and lots of garlic plants and test them all for efficacy, though.

I don't think it's correct to assume the speeds are equal. Genetic mutations propagate across viruses and plants at very different speeds.

A generation of bacteria is way shorter lived than a generation of garlic. It would depend on how much the garlic was used though I'm pretty sure, though you might need to talk to an actual biologist for details.

Also, unless garlic defended itself from MRSA by killing it human guided selection would be better, what if the garlic is sneaky and figures out another way to survive that doesn't help humans.

The story was more about the combination of the ingredients called "eye salve." Which includes more than just garlic, but also wine and cow bile.

Why? People have known about the antibacterial and antiviral properties of allium for hundreds of years, so it's not like anything is going to magically change.

Penicillin mold has existed for millions of years, but it was widespread therapeutic use in humans that caused extensive resistance. Humans are the ecological version of "magic".

right, but they'll lose their resistance to our current antibiotics, so we can just go back and forth between those :)

10-20 year win!

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