Can CBD Kill Bacteria?
If you didn’t know it- Antibiotics may cause a massive problem that can lead to the next “super-bug”.
100 years ago if you had an infection, you’d get this brand new discovery: Penicillin to nip it in the bud.
Fast forward to today and you can’t even get a prescription for penicillin anymore. Why?
Bacteria develop armor over time that can lead to antibiotics becoming ineffective. Things like Staphylococcus aureus became stronger and stronger against the antibiotic designed to kill it: Methicillin. After Staph became resistant to Methicillin, the world was introduced to MRSA or Methicillin-Resistant Staph Aureus.
As a society, we had to up our game with antibiotics after penicillin became obsolete and methicillin became obsolete. We’ve developed stronger and stronger medicines to combat infections. Now we have Vancomycin 3.0 (25,000x stronger that it’s first version in the 1960’s).
AND BACTERIA ARE STILL RESISTING IT
So, you could get MRSA (or some other infection) and due to the overuse of antibiotics we have, never be able to fight it off.
This is leading the medical community to search for things to make antibiotics more effective. They’re called helper compounds.
And CBD may just be the newest one.
According to research from the University of Southern Denmark. CBD combined with bacitracin kills staph, and particularly MRSA. More effectively than bacitracin alone.
When studied under a microscope, CBD is helping bacitracin kill off MRSA but the exact mechanism of action is not yet clearly understood. The conclusion seems very clear according to the research team.
“The result shows that a clear synergistic effect in fact exists between CBD and BAC, and that the effect is bactericidal.”
Another interesting finding was that the CBD and bacitracin combo is only effective against gram positive bacteria (the tougher stuff) like MRSA, MRSE Enterococcus and Listeria.
For the future, this could mean that CBD will be studied more as a helper compound in antibiotics. We may be seeing the first of many studies with CBD and antibiotics and in today’s age of the COVID-19 pandemic, stronger versions of MRSA and the continued development of stronger antibiotics: we need all the help we can get!
The research isn’t clear on its mechanism of action, but in a study where CBD was combined with bacitracin vs bacitracin alone, CBD was concluded to help kill MRSA. When the CBD was degraded after several hours, the MRSA returned [ref: U of Southern Denmark]
Directly, no. But, it may act as a helper compound with bacitracin to kill gram-positive bacteria, like MRSA.