Health Supreme

Could this be the end of superbugs? 

Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls. 

"We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways," Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. "One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself." 

The research has been published in Nature Microbiology, and according to Smith, it's already being hailed by scientists in the field as "a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine".

Scientists from Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research have shown that a narrow wavelength of ultraviolet light safely killed drug-resistant MRSA bacteria in mice, suggesting its potential to reduce surgical site infections. 

A paper just published by PLOS ONE describes how the Columbia team found that a particular wavelength of UV light known as “far-UVC” (in this instance, 207 nanometers) is not only as effective as conventional germicidal UV light in killing MRSA, as shown in their previously published study, but also shows for the first time that, unlike conventional germicidal UV, far-UVC does not cause biological damage to exposed skin.