Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
WASHINGTON, June 24 (AFP) - Breast milk contains a component that is effective in treating skin warts resistant to conventional treatment, Swedish researchers found in a study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study began with 40 patients with warts that had been resistant to conventional treatment.
Twenty patients were treated topically for their warts with the isolated human milk component three times a day for three weeks, and 20 in a control group were treated with a placebo, said the report.
At the end of the three weeks, all 20 patients in the active group showed a reduction in wart volume of 75 percent or more.
Only three of the 20 patients in the control group showed a similar result.
When the 20 patients in the control group were treated with the active ingredient, they showed an 82 percent reduction in wart volume.
Two years after the end of the experiment, all warts had disappeared in 83 percent of the patients, the study showed.
bur/ger/aln/mdl
US-health-milk
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
