A new study carried out by Egyptian researchers revealed another advantage of ‘green tea.’

The researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt.stated that besides cutting prostate cancer threat and protecting the bladder from getting inflamed, green tea also raises the effectiveness of antibiotics by three times even against so-called ‘superbugs.’

Mervat Kassem of Alexandria University in Egypt, said, “We tested green tea in combination with antibiotics against 28 disease-causing micro-organisms belonging to two different classes.”

“In every single case green tea enhanced the bacteria-killing activity of the antibiotics. For example the killing effect of chloramphenicol was 99.99 percent better when taken with green tea than when taken on its own in some circumstances,” Mr. Kassem added.

Kassem and his fellow workers also discovered that green tea produced 20% of drug-resistant bacteria, which is liable to cephalosporin antibiotics, an important category of antibiotics to which new drug-resistant bacteria strains have evolved resistance.

The study researchers were really surprised with the study outcomes.

In each case and for all types of antibiotics the researchers examined, they detected that intake of green tea at the same time as consuming the antibiotics seemed to enhance the antibiotics action and lessen drug resistance in bacteria.

In a few cases, even low densities of green tea were effective.

“Our results show that we should consider more seriously the natural products we consume in our everyday life,” says Dr Kassem. “In the future, we will be looking at other natural herb products such as marjoram and thyme to see whether they also contain active compounds which can help in the battle against drug resistant bacteria”.

The study findings were presented at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh, Scotland.