New penicillin found in wallaby milk

link

Well if this don't beat all. Who actually thought of trying this in the first place. Thumbs up to the researchers.

Scientists have discovered a bacteria-fighting compound 100 times more effective than penicillin - in wallaby milk.

Researchers found the highly-potent compound, tagged AGG01, was active against a wide variety of fungi and bacteria including antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Wonder what other wonder drugs are still out there not discovered.

Sounds like it needs to be synthesised on a large scale before anything interesting can happen, as I don't like that chances of fighting a bug by waiting for milk to go off, but yeah, sounds like a major discovery.

I thought 'wallaby' was a brand, but it's the animal, lol. Well, at least I live in Aus. If something really bad does go down, I might be able to catch one if I really had to.

One hundred times more effective than penicillin at fighting bacteria such a E Coli? Why didn't we discover this 50 years ago?!

I read this on digg last night good article. It is not penicillan though i found that title misleading since penicillan comes from bread mold not milk,

Wow, this is good news. For a long time now people have been synthesizing anti-biotics in the lab, making new chemicals, and they've been becomming less and less effective. Now we find something, right there in nature, very nice!

This is excellent news. Because of, what I would consider, overuse of general antibiotics, "superbugs" and the development of resistance to antibiotics, mankind has become more vulnerable to general infections.

I know that there has been quite a bit of research on finding new antibiotics and this discovery is certainly an important one. Hopefully, physicians will be more careful about prescribing or, to be more precise, over-prescibing, any new generation of antibiotics. We, as a society, have become too complacent and simply expect the treatment and cures for whatever ails us. We have negated our responsibility to use our "knowledge" wisely and, in the process, have put everyone at risk. Hopefully we have learned our lesson -- for a while.

Great. Now there'll be wallaby farms all over the place. The pharm companies are already abusing pregnant mares for estrogen production. I'm sure that won't be enough to satisfy their greed.

I'm for wallaby farms, not synthesizing. The neat thing about life - and compounds produced by living things - is that they evolve along with the microbes.

Great find btw.