Recently, scientists have discovered that ground up bug brains could help fight infectious diseases. Inside their buggy little brains are chemical compounds that could possibly kill E. coli and MRSA.
E. coli can make a person violently ill and MSRA can cause skin infections. Simon Lee and Naveed Kahn are the microbiologists who studied this topic. They came up with the idea after some soldiers from the Middle East came back sick and with strange infections, but locusts from the same area were not sick and did not have any infections. Lee and Naveed wondered how the locusts that lived in unhigienic places avoided disease and infection. Researchers ground up parts of locusts and cockroaches and put them in mixtures with harmful bacteria. When they put the tissue from cockroach and locust brains in with the bacteria, it killed nearly 100 percent. That's when they discovered that the bug's brains contain chemicals that kill bacteria that are found in E. coli and MSRA.
Now don't be going to your local Walgreens looking for bug brains to cure an infection anytime soon! Scientists are still studying which chemicals fight disease and infection. Maybe sometime in the future bugs brains will be used as a cure for sickness.
By Rhyan Montgomery
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