Cinnamon Oil: A New Antibacterial?
.jpg)
There are many natural products from animals, plants, fungi and bacteria that possess antibacterial properties. This makes complete sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Therefore, it should comes as no surprise that spices like cinnamon and natural products like honey possess inherent antibacterial properties. Nevertheless, despite my over 30 years as a card-carrying bacteriologist, I always pleased and pleasantly surprised when I learn that a common substance like cinnamon oil has potent antibacterial activity against antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens.
A recent study showed that a cinnamon oil solution was capable of killing a variety of nosocomial bacterial pathogens including Streptococcus pneumoniae and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Moreover, the cinnamon oil appeared to be as effective as several antiseptics and disinfectants widely used in many hospitals. And, this isn’t the first report on the antibacterial effects of cinnamon oil. In a 2008 study, French researchers showed cinnamon oil solutions of 10% or less were effective against S. aureus, Escherichia coli and several antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Further, there is a precedent for the use of cinnamon-derived products as an antiseptic. In the Middle Ages thieves who stole jewelry from dead bodies and used “thieves oil”—a concoction consisting of cinnamon bark, lemon oil and eucalyptus—rarely got ill. Finally, cinnamon oil when topically applied to the skin is generally safe. However, in some people it can cause an allergic reaction.
This is good news for a country that has grown increasingly obsessed with chemically-based antibacterial soaps and sanitizers whose overuse may actually be selecting for the emergence of strains of multiple antibiotic resistant bacteria. Nevertheless, the use of natural antiseptics like cinnamon and other plant oils as sanitizers may help to reduce the growing incidence of drug resistance among nosocomial bacterial pathogens.
Until next time....
Good Luck and Remember to Wash Your Hands (with plain soap, not antibacterial-containing products!)
As an undergraduate at Cornell, I took a course called "Bee Keeping" mostly because it had the reputation of being a “gut” course (i.e., easy to ace) and I had a passing interest in entomological microbiology. To this day, I will tell you that it is one of the best courses that I have taken in my academic career. It was taught by a practicing bee keeper who maintained hives in Florida during the winter and in Ithaca during the summer (not surprisingly the course was taught in the Spring semester so that his bees could pollinate the local crops).
A friend of mine accidentally gashed his leg on an open dishwasher door and thought nothing of it for several weeks until he noticed that the wound wasn’t healing and it hurt really badly. He eventually went to the emergency room at a local, where the ER docs cultured the wound and sent him home with a prescription for oral antibiotics. The antibiotics stopped working several days later and he wound up in another local hospital–this time he was admitted and the spent the next 5 days on a variety of intravenous antibiotics. Despite the treatment (they could not find the right antibiotic combination at first because they never recultured the wound) his leg turned black from his ankle to his knee and they almost had to amputate. He is back at home now and will be treated with a regimen of iv antibiotics for the next 6 weeks or so. I talked with him last week and I learned that his leg wound is still not completely healed and the infectious disease docs are worried!
