Antibiotic Effect

Allicin, Natural Antibacterial Agent

Garlic has been used for centuries in various societies to combat infectious disease. Historically, it is believed that Louis Pasteur described the antibacterial effect of garlic in 1858 for the first time, and in World War I extracts of garlic were used in antibacterial and antiseptic therapeutics. Numerous scientific studies concerning the antibacterial potential of garlic have been published.

Garlic has been proven to be effective against a plethora of gram-positive, gram-negative, and acid-fast bacteria. These include Salmonella, Escherichia coli (Adler and Beuchat, 2002), Pseudomonas, Proteus, Staphylococcus aureus (Cavallito, 1944), Escherichia coli, Salmonella (Johnson and Vaughn, 1969), Klebsiella (Jezowa and Rafinski, 1966), Micrococcus, Bacillus subtulis (Sharma et al., 1977 ), Clostridium (De Witt et al., 1979 ), Mycobacterium (Delaha and Garagusi, 1985 ), and Helicobacter (O’Gara et al., 2000 ). It has been documented that garlic exerts a differential inhibition between beneficial intestinal microflora and potentially harmful enterobacteria (Ress et al., 1993).

Allicin is almost Exclusively Responsible for the Antimicrobial Activity of Freshly Crushed Garlic.

The antibacterial properties are shown in Table 1. Corresponding studies have shown that allicin is effective against numerous bacteria (2, 5), among others against helicobacter (6) and Salmonella flexneri Y. In the rabbit experiment, allicin was active against Shigella.

Allicin is effective against numerous fungi. The antifungal effect is shown in Table 2 (7, 8, 9, 10).

Tab 1; Antibacterial effect of allicin on various bacteria

LD 50: dose that kills 50% of bacteria

Tab. 2 Antifungal activity of allicin on various types of fungi

MIC: Minimal inhibitory concentration, ie minimum dose that prevents growth of the fungi