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.

服用抗生素吗？那么你也许想喝点绿茶来增强它们的效用。最新研究表明，绿茶有助于抗生素对抗那些顽固的超级病菌，使得抗生素的功效达到之前的三倍。

埃及亚历山大大学医药学教授Mervat Kassem说：“我們在结合抗生素对抗 28 种疾病的情況下测试绿茶（這些疾病由属于两种不同纲的微生物所引起）。在每個单一的例子中，我们发现绿茶都能增強抗生素的杀菌作用。例如，当抗生素与绿茶结合在一起服用時，氯黴素在某些情況下的杀菌效果比单独服药要好上99.99%。”

绿茶也使得20%的抗药性细菌易受其中一种头孢子菌素（cephalosporin）抗生素的影响。這都是些重要的抗生素，而新抗药性品种的细菌正逐步对它们产生抗药性。

这些结果让研究者感到惊讶，因为几乎在所有被测试的抗生素例子中显示，在人们服药的同時，辅佐绿茶可以減少细菌的抗药性，即便是在超级病菌存在的情况下，绿茶也能增加抗生素的作用。在某些例子中，即便是低浓度的绿茶都有效果。

这些数据都来源于近期于爱丁堡国际会议中心举行的第162届普通微生物大会。