Old texts reveal new treatments

ROCHESTER, Minn., Dec. 29 (UPI) -- A new antibiotic from the Atun tree in the Pacific islands was recently discovered by Mayo Clinic scientists after reading old texts.

The team, led by Brent Bauer, director of the Mayo Clinic Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program, consulted a Dutch book written by Georg Eberhard Rumpf in 1650 on native herbal medicines.

Rumpf was a German-born naturalist who worked for the Dutch East Indies Company, and his treatise on the herbal healing traditions of the Indonesian island of Ambon included a section on the anti-diarrheal properties of extracts from the fruit kernels of the Atun tree.

When Mayo scientists prepared and tested these extracts, they found that they worked as Rumpf described and killed bacteria that caused diarrhea quickly and efficiently.

"Natural products are invaluable sources of healing agents ... so it's not far-fetched to think that ... an ancient text and insights from traditional medicine really may impact modern public health," Bauer said, citing aspirin, which was originally derived from willow bark and the anticancer drug Taxol that comes from the bark of the Pacific yew tree

Co-investigator Eric Buenz added that, since native cultures have lived intimately with botanical healing agents for thousands of years and used them to create effective healing traditions, modern medicine can rely on their discoveries and should work with traditional healing cultures to preserve their knowledge.

A report on the new antibiotic appears in the December 23 issue of the British Medical Journal.