On the turps last night? Feeling bleary? You might just have saved yourself some hospital time.
Alcoholic drinks aren’t generally put into the category of health food, but in some cases they might be just the cure for nasty parasites. That’s according to a study published online on February 16 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, showing that fruit flies will actually seek out alcohol to kill off blood-borne parasitic wasps living within them.
The discovery offers some of the first evidence that alcohol might be used to fight infection, the researchers say.
“We found that environmental alcohol protects fruit flies from being parasitized by wasps, and that, even after being infected, fruit fly consumption of alcohol leads to death of the wasps growing within them,” said Todd Schlenke of Emory University. “Surprisingly, fly larvae actively seek out ethanol-containing food when infected, showing they use alcohol as an antiwasp medicine.”
Wasp mothers will lay their eggs in fruit fly larvae. Their young hatchlings then eat the flies from the inside out. Fortunately for flies of the species Drosophila melanogaster, they have developed a tolerance for alcohol over evolutionary time, a necessity for a life living in and feeding on rotting and fermented fruit.
“D. melanogaster has a special ability to tolerate high levels of alcohol,” Schlenke said. “It seemed possible that this ability might protect the flies from generalist parasites.” In fact, those parasites might have even helped push the flies toward an alcohol-drinking existence, he added.
It is tempting to think that the findings in flies might have application to other alcohol-drinking animals, including humans, the researchers say. Until now, the notion that alcohol consumption might cure human ailments—particularly stomach infections—has been the stuff of online chat sites and not the scientific literature, they note. As a simple first test, they suggest that ethanol could be added to parasite cultures in the lab to find out what sort of effect it might have.
Source; Cell Press
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
