Taking antibiotics? You might want to boost their powers by drinking some green tea. New research indicates that drinking green tea helps the action of important antibiotics in their fight against resistant superbugs, making them up tothree times more effective.

    “We tested green tea in combination with antibiotics against 28 disease causing micro-organisms belonging to two different classes,” says Dr Mervat Kassem from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Alexandria University in Egypt. “In every single case green tea enhanced the bacteria-killing activity of the antibiotics. For example the killing effect of chloramphenicol was 99.99% better when taken with green tea than when taken on its own in some circumstances.”

    Green tea also made 20% of drug-resistant bacteria susceptible to one of the cephalosporin antibiotics. These are important antibiotics that new drug resistant strains of bacteria have evolved to resist.

    The results surprised the researchers, showing that in almost every case and for all types of antibiotics tested, drinking green tea at the same time as taking the medicines seemed to reduce the bacteria’s drug resistance, even in superbug strains, and increase the action of the antibiotics. In some cases, even a low concentration of green tea was effective.

    These data were presented during the Society for General Microbiology’s 162nd meeting recently held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

    服用抗生素嗎？那么你也許想喝點綠茶來增強它們的效用。最新研究表明，綠茶有助于抗生素對抗那些頑固的超級病菌，使得抗生素的功效達到之前的三倍。

    埃及亞歷山大大學醫藥學教授Mervat Kassem說：“我們在結合抗生素對抗 28 種疾病的情況下測試綠茶（這些疾病由屬于兩種不同綱的微生物所引起）。在每個單一的例子中，我們發現綠茶都能增強抗生素的殺菌作用。例如，當抗生素與綠茶結合在一起服用時，氯黴素在某些情況下的殺菌效果比單獨服藥要好上99.99%。”

    綠茶也使得20%的抗藥性細菌易受其中一種頭孢子菌素（cephalosporin）抗生素的影響。這都是些重要的抗生素，而新抗藥性品種的細菌正逐步對它們產生抗藥性。

    這些結果讓研究者感到驚訝，因為幾乎在所有被測試的抗生素例子中顯示，在人們服藥的同時，輔佐綠茶可以減少細菌的抗藥性，即便是在超級病菌存在的情況下，綠茶也能增加抗生素的作用。在某些例子中，即便是低濃度的綠茶都有效果。

    這些數據都來源于近期于愛丁堡國際會議中心舉行的第162屆普通微生物大會。