Can onions and garlic kill the Influenza virus?

Sumerians, Chinese, ancient Indians, Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Tibetans, Slavic, Arabic and the list goes on and on naming hundreds of cultures that used garlic not only for its known culinary properties but for its health benefits and as a well-trusted universal folk remedy for the treatment of various illnesses and ailments. Some cultures still know garlic as ‘Russian penicillin’, ‘natural antibiotic’, ‘vegetable viagra’, ‘plant talisman’, ‘rustic's theriac’ and ‘snake grass’ [5,6].

In the past, garlic was used as a folk remedy during various epidemics such as typhus, dysentery, cholera, influenza, and whenever an epidemic has emerged. Garlic has been the first preventive and curative remedy [5,6]. Now, back to the subject, who didn't heard about the saying that onions and garlic collect and kill the flu (influenza) virus spread since its origins time ago in the 1919? I found it interesting enough to enter a little bit deeper and see if there were probably other reasons to believe garlic and onions really got this claimed anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties. But let's see what we found about Garlic (Allium sativum) and onion (Allium cepa), it may surprise some of us at the end. Image: Red onions & garlic by Anna Majkowska under Creative Common license (CC BY 2.0).

ALLIUM SATIVUM

Family: Amaryllidaceae
Genus: Allium
Common name: Garlic.

REFERENCES

[1] Preventing the common cold with a garlic supplement: a double-blind, placebo-controlled survey. Josling P. Garlic Centre, Battle, East Sussex, United Kingdom.

[2] Selenium deficiency increases the pathology of an influenza virus infection1 MELINDA A. BECK,*,†,2 HEATHER K. NELSON,* QING SHI,† PETER VAN DAEL,‡ EDUARDO J. SCHIFFRIN,‡ STEPHANIE BLUM,‡ DENIS BARCLAY,‡ AND ORVILLE A. LEVANDER§ Departments of *Nutrition and †Pediatrics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-7220, USA; ‡Nestle´ Research Center, Lausanne, Switzerland; and §USDA, ARS, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, Beltsville, Maryland, USA

[3] Antioxidant effects and antimicrobial activites of phytoncide. Abe T, Hisama M, Tanimoto S, Shibayama H, Mihara Y, Nomura M. TOYO BEAUTY CO., LTD, Higashinakamoto, Higashinari-ku, Osaka 537-0021, Japan.

[4] The phytoncide activity of several varieties of garlic stored for different periods of time. Borukh IF, Kirbaba VI, Barabash OIu, Demkevich LI.

[5] Toplak GK. Zagreb: Mozaik Kniga; 2005. Domace lekovito bilje; pp. 50–51.

[6] Extracts from the history and medical properties of garlic Biljana Bauer Petrovska and Svetlana Cekovska1

[7] Anti-Atherosclerotic Therapy Based on Botanicals.
Orekhov AN, Sobenin IA, Korneev NV, Kirichenko TV, Myasoedova VA, Melnichenko AA, Balcells M, Edelman ER, Bobryshev YV.
Source
Dr. Yuri V Bobryshev, Faculty of Medicine, SOMS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia.

[8] Garlic, by the University of Maryland Medical Center.