The gentlebirth.org website is provided courtesy of
Ronnie Falcao, LM MS, a homebirth midwife in Mountain View, CA

Garlic to Treat GBS

Garlic kills Group B Strep (GBS) and if you would like to participate in research to test if garlic can prevent newborn GBS please read on:

Fresh crushed Garlic kills GBS.  Therefore, perhaps Garlic may be able to prevent newborn GBS disease by "treating" pregnant mothers with it.  Garlic may have less side effects than Penicillin in preventing GBS. We don't know. There have been 3 recent studies (1,2,3) which fed garlic to pregnant rats, and 1 study(4) which fed garlic to 100 pregnant women to lower their blood pressure.  None of these studies found harmful effects of oral garlic in pregnancy. Each study found garlic to have a protective effect in pregnancy.  None of these studies determined what the safe dose of garlic is for pregnant low-risk women. So far, aside from myself, no one is studying garlic to prevent Newborn Strep.

 I am collecting results from women around the world through email.  Women in many countries are routinely cultured towards the end of pregnancy for GBS.  If the results are positive? when labor starts, the doctor orders  2 million units of Penicillin as a first dose and then 1 million units every 4 hours.

1 in about 5,000 women will have life long kidney damage from an allergic reaction to the Penicillin. Approximately 1 full term baby per 1000 will be saved by the antibiotics.

When  Garlic is inserted vaginally for seven or eight nights (and/or eaten daily) it will convert a large percentage of women who previously cultured positive(+) to GBS negative(-). This is particularly true if the culture is taken immediately after the last day of treatment.

Garlic cloves differ in their amount of active, anti-microbial ingredient, called "allicin". The active ingredient is released upon cutting or crushing the clove. The active ingredient is toxic to GBS as well as yeast and cancer cells.  If a woman has damaged vaginal skin inserting garlic may result in a burning sensation.

Just as antibiotics have bad side effects, it seems logical that garlic also has side effects. This study proposes to test an alternative to antibiotics, but does not promise results. That's why it is a study!
 
Garlic protocol:

Break a fresh, hard clove from a bulb of garlic and peel off the paper-like cover. Cut in half.  A whole clove will NOT work.  A crushed clove releases more allicin, but is harder to insert.  Sew a string through it for easy retrieval.

Put damaged garlic clove in  your vagina in the evening before you go to sleep. Many women taste garlic in their mouths as soon as it is in their vagina- so it is less pleasant to treat while awake.

In the morning, the garlic may come out when you poop. If not, many women find it is easiest to take it out on the toilet. Circle the vagina with a finger, till you find it. It cannot enter the uterus through the cervix. It cannot get lost- but it can get pushed into the pocket between the cervix and the vaginal wall.

Most people will taste the garlic as long as it is in there. So if you still taste it, it is probably still in there. Most women have trouble getting it out the first time.
For easy retrieval sew a string through the middle of the clove before you put it in-  You don't want to get irritated in the process of getting rid of the GBS. Be gentle. Dot scratch yourself with long nails.  Repeat this for 8 nights (around week 36). Or for 2 nights on, 1 night off, for  5 times (8 nights in 15 days)
After the eight night of treatment, get cultured at the health care place you go to. Before you go to get the culture, wash perineum and rectal area with soap and put on clean cotton underwear.  GBS usually lives in your large intestine, and from there contaminates the vagina.  A Rectal/Vaginal culture is done with a cotton swab inserted into the vagina and then into the anus.

When women are treated with antibiotics, the GBS returns soon after antibiotics regime is finished. The same is probably true with garlic. Therefore, if you culture positive and then use garlic to get a negative culture, you might consider inserting garlic once a week until you deliver the baby.

The level of garlic "smell" is a very poor indication of the real amount of
allicin (active ingredient) that is generated. The olfactory receptors of the average person are so sensitive that even 1 mg of allicin molecules in the air will saturate the receptors so our nose and seem the same as 100 mg.
 
Allicin is gradually produced in the crushed clove for about 2 hours after the clove is damaged and simultaneously degraded. Once in contact with the mucosa or bacteria it degrades rapidly. No one knows how long it can be active when in contact with mucosa. We know that if you drink pure allicin within 5 minutes you can not detect it anymore because it all got adsorbed through the mucosal lining.

Bacteria are about 30 times more sensitive to allicin than human cells but at high concentrations also human cells suffer so in conclusion it would be more effective as an antibacterial and less toxic to the mucosa if women would use smaller amounts of crushed garlic with more frequent changes.
 
If you decide to try this protocol, please email me with as much information as possible: judyslome@hotmail.com and put GBS in the subject line:

1. History of GBS on previous pregnancy or is this your first pregnancy?

2. Garlic treatment = ___ nights?  Half clove? Full clove?

3. Date of culture- was it urine culture? recto-vaginal swab? Vaginal culture?

4. Results of culture after garlic treatment.

5. Please describe any adverse/untoward events

I will publish the results as soon as I have the results of 300 women who have used the protocol. No personal identification information would be kept – your  information will be combined with others and hopefully published in tabulated form in a medical journal, so that future patients would benefit from your efforts.

Read more:

www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/RR/RR5111.pdf

http:

References:

1.  Prevention of fumonisin-induced maternal and developmental toxicity in rats by certain plant extracts. J Appl Toxicol Nov-Dec 2004;24(6):469-74.

2.  Emergence of Long-Term Memory for Conditioned Aversion in the Rat Fetus. Dev Psychobio 2004; 44: 189–198.

3.  Protective effects of garlic juice against embryotoxicity of methylmercuric chloride administered to pregnant Fischer 344 rats. Yonsei Med J. 1999;40(5):483-9.

4. The effect of garlic on plasma lipids and platelets in primips with high risk of preeclampsia. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol. 2001 Dec 1;99(2):201-6.

PS. In case you were wondering: Garlic ingestion by pregnant women alters the odor of amniotic fluid. Chem Senses. 1995 Apr;20(2):207-9.