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You are here: Home / For the Love of Tea / Web MD: Can hot tea cut MRSA risk?…

Web MD: Can hot tea cut MRSA risk?…

July 12, 2011 by Emily 1 Comment

No, I’m not one of those people who uses Web MD to diagnose my every ailment. That’s what Google’s for. But they’re reporting on some pretty interesting research (from Annals of Family Medicine) on the effects hot tea or coffee can have on MRSA evidence in the nose. (Yuck.)

Here’s an excerpt:

Nearly 2.5 million people have evidence of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) inside their noses. In the study, people who drank hot tea were 50% less likely to have MRSA in their nose, compared with people who did not drink hot tea. The same held for people who drank coffee vs. those who didn’t. Soft drinks and iced tea had no significant effect on nasal MRSA risk.

The more coffee or tea participants drank, the lower their risk for MRSA, says study author Eric Matheson, MD, an assistant professor of family medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

The study showed an association between tea and coffee drinking and MRSA risk, but does not show cause and effect. “The next logical step is to see if tea or coffee has any effect on people with MRSA,” Matheson says.

There are a few theories as to why tea and coffee — as long as it is hot — may help.

“Certain compounds in tea or tea-based extracts may have antimicrobial properties that can possibly destabilize and weaken this superbug,” he says.

Just don’t put your beverage on ice, Matheson says. “Some of these compounds may be destroyed when they are iced, as they are more soluble at higher temperatures,” he says. It may also be that some of the antimicrobial compounds are breathed in via the vapors from piping hot cups of coffee or tea.

“If you don’t drink coffee or tea and work in a health care setting, you may want to start and this may decrease your risk of carrying MRSA in the nose,” he says. “It couldn’t hurt.”

Click below for the whole article. And if you think you’re at risk, keep that caffeine hot, folks.

Source: Web MD

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Alex Zorach says

    July 20, 2011 at 1:24 PM

    This is interesting. I’ve always thought that there was a benefit to breathing the vapors of tea, when it comes to preventing sinus infections.

    MSRA is interesting…it may be resistant to most of the synthetic antibiotics, but it is vulnerable to numerous plant compounds. For example, peppermint, spearmint, and Japanese mint have been found to inhibit and kill MSRA as well as other strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There’s some discussion and a source for this on the health effects section of RateTea.net’s page on mint tea. But mint isn’t the only herb that has this effect.



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