Shallots for Antimicrobial and Immune Support

This is the one benefit area where shallot-specific research genuinely exists, and it stretches back to 1979. Crushed shallot juice does inhibit bacteria and fungi in a petri dish. That has been demonstrated repeatedly, by independent groups, over more than four decades. The chemistry behind it is well understood and not in dispute.

It is also the benefit area where the gap between the laboratory and the clinic is widest, and where believing the claim can do real harm. A compound that kills Staphylococcus aureus in a well plate at a concentration achievable only by pressing raw shallots directly onto the bacteria is not an antibiotic. Nobody has ever shown that eating shallots clears an infection in a person. This page takes the laboratory work seriously and refuses to let it graduate.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Being Claimed
2. The Chemistry: Thiosulfinates and Thiol Reactivity
3. The Shallot Antimicrobial Literature Since 1979
4. Which Organisms, and at What Concentrations
5. Antifungal Activity
6. The Peel Problem
7. Immune Modulation: What Is Actually Measured
8. Allergic Rhinitis: The One Clinical Line
9. Colds and Respiratory Infection
10. Wound Healing and Topical Use
11. Why Laboratory Activity Is Not an Antibiotic
12. Traditional Use, Labelled as Such
13. Practical Guidance
14. Cautions
15. Key Research Papers
16. Connections

What Is Being Claimed

Sort the claims by how much support they have and the picture becomes clear immediately.

• "Shallot extracts inhibit bacteria and fungi in vitro." True, replicated, shallot-specific. Tier: preliminary — in vitro.
• "Shallots have antimicrobial compounds." True, and mechanistically explained. Tier: established chemistry.
• "Eating shallots helps fight infection." Never tested in humans. Tier: no evidence.
• "Shallots boost immunity." Not a testable claim as usually phrased. Some immune parameters shift in animal and cell studies; whether that reduces illness in people is unknown. Tier: preliminary at best.
• "Shallots help allergic rhinitis." There is one small clinical line of research from a Thai group. Tier: preliminary clinical — the only shallot work that reaches into human treatment at all.
• "Shallots can replace antibiotics." False and dangerous. Tier: contradicted by the absence of any human evidence.

The Chemistry: Thiosulfinates and Thiol Reactivity

The mechanism is one of the better-understood stories in plant chemistry, and understanding it explains both why the laboratory results are real and why they do not transfer.

The trigger. An intact shallot cell keeps non-volatile cysteine sulfoxides in the cytoplasm and the enzyme alliinase locked in the vacuole. This is a defence system held in two halves. Cut, crush or chew the tissue and the compartments break; alliinase meets its substrate and, within seconds, produces reactive thiosulfinates. Rose, Whiteman, Moore and Zhu reviewed the whole family of bioactive S-alk(en)yl cysteine sulfoxide metabolites in the genus Allium in Natural Product Reports in 2005.

Why they kill microbes. Thiosulfinates are electrophiles. They react readily with free thiol groups, which means they attack cysteine residues in microbial enzymes and inactivate them. Because this is chemistry rather than a receptor interaction, it is indiscriminate: the same reactivity hits many enzymes in many organisms, which is why allium extracts show activity against a broad range of bacteria, fungi and even protozoa in the laboratory. Ankri and Mirelman set out this mechanism for allicin in Microbes and Infection in 1999. Lanzotti, Scala and Bonanomi reviewed compounds from Allium species with cytotoxic and antimicrobial activity in Phytochemistry Reviews in 2014.

The shallot-versus-garlic distinction, stated precisely. Garlic's dominant precursor is alliin, which yields allicin. Shallots and other onion-type alliums are dominated by isoalliin (trans-S-1-propenyl-L-cysteine sulfoxide) plus methiin and propiin, which yield propenyl- and propyl-derived thiosulfinates instead. They also feed lachrymatory factor synthase, the enzyme Imai and colleagues characterized in Nature in 2002 — the one that makes you cry. So shallots generate allicin-family compounds but very little allicin proper, and any shallot product advertising standardized allicin content is either mislabelled or contains garlic.

Instability is the whole problem. Thiosulfinates decompose within minutes to hours into sulfides, polysulfides, vinyldithiins and ajoene-type compounds. Heat destroys alliinase before it can act. So a raw crushed shallot, a shallot simmered in a curry and a jar of fried shallot crisps have three different antimicrobial profiles, and only the first resembles what the laboratory studies used. Ratseewo and colleagues measured how drying methods change shallot chemical composition, volatiles and bioactive retention in Food Chemistry: X in 2025.

The Shallot Antimicrobial Literature Since 1979

Unusually for this site's allium pages, the studies below used shallot itself.

The founding comparison. Dankert, Tromp, de Vries and Klasen compared the antimicrobial activity of crude juices of Allium ascalonicum, Allium cepa and Allium sativum in Zentralblatt fur Bakteriologie in 1979 — a direct three-way test of shallot, onion and garlic, and still one of the cleanest framings of the question. Garlic was the most potent; shallot and onion showed activity. Tier: preliminary — in vitro.

Heat stability. Amin and Kapadnis reported heat-stable antimicrobial activity of Allium ascalonicum against bacteria and fungi in the Indian Journal of Experimental Biology in 2005. This finding matters more than it first appears: most allium antimicrobial activity is heat-labile, so a heat-stable fraction implies something other than a thiosulfinate is contributing — most plausibly the phenolics, which survive cooking.

Peel extracts and fractions. Mobin, Haq, Ali and colleagues characterized the antibacterial and antioxidant potential of the phenolic extract and its fractions isolated from Allium ascalonicum peel in Natural Product Research in 2022 — a careful fractionation study that supports the phenolic contribution, and a reminder about which part of the bulb gets studied.

Wound-healing potential. Saenthaweesuk and colleagues investigated antimicrobial and wound-healing properties of shallot in 2015, working with extracts in laboratory models. Tier: preliminary.

Cell protection against an environmental toxin. Chuljerm and colleagues reported that shallot (Allium ascalonicum) extracts protected human nasal epithelial cells against oxidative stress induced by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. This is barrier-tissue protection rather than antimicrobial activity, but the respiratory-epithelium context makes it relevant to the immune claims. Tier: preliminary — human cell culture.

Applied animal work. There is a small applied literature on feeding dietary shallot powder to broiler chickens, reporting effects on intestinal morphology, immune measures and gut bacterial populations. It is agricultural production research, and its relevance to human health is indirect at best — you can find it via the PubMed search for shallot powder in broilers.

Which Organisms, and at What Concentrations

The organisms that turn up repeatedly in allium in-vitro work include Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella species, Bacillus species, Helicobacter pylori, and among fungi Candida albicans and several Aspergillus species.

Two of the better-characterized examples happen to be garlic rather than shallot, and they are instructive. O'Gara, Hill and Maslin tested the activities of garlic oil, garlic powder and their diallyl constituents against Helicobacter pylori in Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 2000, and Sivam reviewed protection against Helicobacter pylori and other bacterial infections by garlic in The Journal of Nutrition in 2001. H. pylori is a plausible target on paper because it lives in the stomach, where swallowed food actually goes — and yet the clinical trials that followed did not establish garlic as a treatment. That sequence is the pattern in miniature.

The concentration problem, which is the crux of this page. In-vitro papers report minimum inhibitory concentrations, typically as milligrams of crude extract per millilitre of culture medium. Read them and the picture is consistent: the concentrations needed are high, often equivalent to a substantial fraction of raw bulb applied directly and undiluted to the organism.

Now consider what happens when you eat a shallot instead. It is chewed and diluted in gastric contents. The thiosulfinates react with dietary protein thiols on the way down — they are indiscriminate electrophiles, so food itself quenches them. Gastric acid and enzymes act on what survives. Absorption across the gut wall is partial. The compounds are metabolized in the liver. Whatever reaches the bloodstream is diluted into roughly five litres of plasma. The concentration at a site of infection in your lung or your urinary tract is orders of magnitude below the inhibitory concentration measured in the dish, and that arithmetic does not have a workaround.

Antifungal Activity

Allium antifungal activity is well documented in the laboratory and is one of the plausible reasons alliums became so widely used in traditional food preservation. Yin and Tsao reported the inhibitory effect of seven Allium plants on three Aspergillus species in the International Journal of Food Microbiology in 1999 — a comparative study across the genus. Zohri, Abdel-Gawad and Saber reported antibacterial, antidermatophytic and antitoxigenic activities of onion oil in Microbiological Research in 1995, including activity against the fungi responsible for skin infections and against aflatoxin production.

What this supports and what it does not. It supports the food-science observation that alliums retard spoilage organisms, which is a real and useful property. It does not support treating a fungal nail infection, oral thrush, vaginal candidiasis or athlete's foot with shallot preparations. Those are conditions with effective, cheap, well-tested treatments, and the anti-candida internet literature that leans on allium in-vitro data routinely omits that fact.

The Peel Problem

This deserves its own section because it silently distorts a large share of allium research.

Phenolic compounds concentrate in the dry outer skin and the outermost fleshy layers of an allium bulb. A researcher who wants a high yield of phenolics per gram of starting material therefore uses the peel — and peel is free, because food processors discard it in industrial quantities. Mobin and colleagues' 2022 study on Allium ascalonicum peel is explicit about this, and it is not unusual. Several of the onion cardiovascular trials referenced across this site also used onion-skin or onion-peel extracts.

Two consequences follow. First, a study's results may not describe the food at all: nobody eats the papery skin. Second, and more usefully, it identifies where the compounds are — which is a genuine argument for peeling shallots conservatively. Take off the papery layer and stop; the fleshy layer directly beneath is the most phenolic-dense edible tissue in the bulb and is routinely thrown away out of habit.

Immune Modulation: What Is Actually Measured

"Immune support" is the vaguest phrase in the supplement vocabulary, so it is worth being concrete about what studies in this area measure.

What gets measured: natural-killer-cell activity in a blood sample, lymphocyte proliferation in response to a stimulus, cytokine concentrations, T-cell subset counts, immunoglobulin levels, and in animal studies the size and cellularity of immune organs. These are biomarkers.

What patients care about: fewer infections, shorter illnesses, milder symptoms.

The gap between those two lists is where most "immune boosting" claims live. A supplement can shift a cytokine and change nothing about how often you get sick.

The allium evidence, labelled. Arreola, Quintero-Fabian, Lopez-Roa and colleagues reviewed immunomodulation and anti-inflammatory effects of garlic compounds in the Journal of Immunology Research in 2015. Marefati and colleagues reviewed the anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and immunomodulatory effects of Allium cepa and its main constituents in Pharmaceutical Biology in 2021. Percival examined how aged garlic extract modifies human immunity in The Journal of Nutrition in 2016. The most clinically framed study in this space is Nantz, Rowe, Muller and colleagues' randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of aged garlic extract, published in Clinical Nutrition in 2012, which reported improved natural-killer and gamma-delta T-cell function and reduced severity of cold and flu symptoms — note the endpoint was symptom severity, not whether participants caught fewer colds. Tier: one randomized clinical trial — of aged garlic extract; the rest reviews of preliminary work.

For shallot specifically: no human immune data. The nasal-epithelial-cell protection work and the broiler-chicken feeding studies are what exist.

Allergic Rhinitis: The One Clinical Line

If shallot research has a single clinical thread, this is it, and it comes from Chiang Mai.

Arpornchayanon, Klinprung, Chansakaow and colleagues published on the antiallergic activities of shallot (Allium ascalonicum L.) and its therapeutic effects in allergic rhinitis, in the Asian Pacific Journal of Allergy and Immunology. The work combined laboratory demonstration of antiallergic activity with investigation of effects in allergic rhinitis. Tier: preliminary clinical — small, single-group, not a large randomized trial.

Why it is mechanistically plausible. Quercetin is a mast-cell stabilizer in vitro: it inhibits histamine release from mast cells and reduces the release of inflammatory mediators. Shallots are quercetin-rich in a well-absorbed form. That makes an antiallergic effect the most chemically coherent of all shallot claims — more coherent than the antimicrobial ones, ironically, because it does not require the compound to reach a bactericidal concentration, only to reach cells at a signalling-relevant one.

Why it is still not a treatment. One small clinical line of work from one group, not independently replicated at scale, is a reason for interest and not a basis for changing management. Allergic rhinitis has genuinely effective treatments: intranasal corticosteroids, second-generation antihistamines, allergen avoidance, and immunotherapy for the right patient. See Allergic Rhinitis and, for the isolated-compound evidence, Quercetin: Allergy and Histamine.

Colds and Respiratory Infection

The most common household claim about alliums is that they help with colds, and the best available answer comes from garlic, which makes it a useful ceiling.

Lissiman, Bhasale and Cohen conducted the Cochrane review "Garlic for the common cold," published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2014. They found only one trial of reasonable quality meeting inclusion criteria — a double-blind placebo-controlled survey by Josling, published in Advances in Therapy in 2001, which reported fewer colds in the garlic group — and concluded that the evidence was insufficient to recommend garlic for cold prevention or treatment. Tier: systematic review of randomized trials, verdict: insufficient evidence.

Read that carefully. For the allium with hundreds of trials, decades of research and an established antimicrobial mechanism, a Cochrane review could find essentially one usable cold trial. The shallot has none. Anyone who tells you shallots prevent colds is not extrapolating from strong evidence about garlic; they are extrapolating from evidence that Cochrane found too thin to act on.

Wound Healing and Topical Use

Alliums have been applied to wounds, boils, bites and stings across most of the world's traditional medical systems, and the in-vitro antimicrobial data makes the practice look reasonable in retrospect.

Saenthaweesuk and colleagues investigated shallot's antimicrobial and wound-healing properties in 2015. Zohri's onion-oil work in 1995 included antidermatophytic activity, relevant to skin infection.

Three reasons not to do it anyway. Raw allium juice on broken skin is an irritant and can cause chemical burns with prolonged contact — the same thiol reactivity that damages microbial enzymes damages your cells. Contact dermatitis from alliums is well documented, particularly in people with repeated exposure. And a home preparation is not sterile; introducing an unsterile plant material into an open wound risks the exact problem you were trying to prevent. Clean water, gentle soap, a proper dressing and medical attention for anything deep, dirty or spreading is better care.

Why Laboratory Activity Is Not an Antibiotic

This section exists because the leap it warns against is the one most likely to hurt someone.

The concentration gap. Covered above. A dish contains no dilution, no protein to quench the electrophile, no gastric acid, no hepatic metabolism and no five-litre volume of distribution. Your bloodstream has all five.

The reactivity problem. Thiosulfinates are non-selective. Achieving an antibacterial concentration in human tissue would mean achieving a concentration that damages human enzymes at the same time, since both depend on the same cysteine-thiol chemistry. Selectivity is exactly what a usable drug requires and exactly what this mechanism lacks. That is not a gap in the research; it is a property of the compound class.

The pharmacokinetic problem. Thiosulfinates decompose in minutes to hours. Even if you achieved a useful concentration, you could not maintain it. Antibiotics work by keeping tissue concentrations above the inhibitory threshold for days.

The clinical consequence. Bacterial infections that need antibiotics — pneumonia, pyelonephritis, cellulitis, sepsis, bacterial meningitis — get worse on a timescale of hours. Delay is the mechanism of harm. Nothing on this page justifies a delay. If you have a fever with rigors, worsening pain, spreading redness, confusion, breathlessness, or a wound producing pus, that is a medical problem and not a culinary one.

What allium chemistry is genuinely good for: flavour, food preservation, and as a starting point for medicinal chemistry. Two of those three benefit you tonight.

Traditional Use, Labelled as Such

Tier: traditional use only. Recorded here as history, not as evidence.

In Indonesian jamu and Malay traditional practice, shallot is a warming, digestive ingredient used in preparations for colds and fevers; a widespread Indonesian home practice rubs grated shallot mixed with coconut oil onto a feverish child, a comforting ritual with no demonstrated antipyretic effect. Vietnamese folk practice uses hanh tim for colds, coughs and digestive complaints, and the New Year pickled shallots (dua hanh) eaten alongside rich Tet food have a partly digestive intent. Shallot appears in Thai traditional formulas for cold and respiratory symptoms, generally in combination rather than alone. Small onions and shallots appear in Ayurvedic and Unani preparations for cough and digestion and as topical applications to boils and stings. Medieval European herbals list shallot as a milder alternative to onion with the same general reputation.

The consistency across unconnected traditions is interesting, and it is a reasonable prompt for research. It is not a substitute for research. Every one of those traditions also confidently recommended things we now know to be inert or harmful.

Practical Guidance

• Eat shallots because they are good food. That is the honest reason, and it is sufficient.
• Raw or lightly cooked preserves the reactive chemistry. Chop and let stand ten minutes before heat if you want the thiosulfinates; alliinase needs time and is destroyed by heat.
• Peel conservatively. Papery skin off, fleshy outer layer on. That layer holds the phenolics.
• Pickled shallots are a good vehicle. The Vietnamese and Thai vinegar-pickling tradition gets you close to raw in a form that keeps well and tastes good with rich food.
• Do not put shallot on a wound. Irritant, not sterile, and worse than soap and water.
• Do not use shallots instead of antibiotics. Ever, for anything.
• Do not buy shallot antimicrobial supplements. No dose, no standardization, no human data, and possibly the wrong species in the capsule.
• If you get recurrent infections, that warrants investigation — blood glucose, immune function, anatomy, dental health — not a food strategy.

Cautions

Never delay antibiotics. The most important caution on this page. Bacterial infections requiring antibiotics deteriorate over hours. If you have a high fever, rigors, spreading redness, worsening pain, breathlessness, confusion or a wound producing pus, seek medical care immediately.

Topical irritation and chemical burns. Raw allium juice held against skin, especially under a dressing or a plaster, can cause a chemical burn. Occupational contact dermatitis from handling alliums is well documented in cooks and food handlers.

Allergy. Allium allergy is uncommon but real and can cause oral allergy symptoms, rhinitis, asthma or, rarely, anaphylaxis in sensitised people. Note the irony relevant to the allergic-rhinitis section: the plant being studied as an antiallergic agent is itself an occasional allergen.

FODMAP intolerance and IBS. Shallots are high in fructans and are excluded during the elimination phase of a low-FODMAP diet, and they reliably trigger bloating, wind and pain in people with irritable bowel syndrome. Shallot-infused oil with the solids strained out is generally tolerated, because fructans are not oil-soluble. See Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Reflux and gastritis. Alliums, especially raw, are a common reflux trigger — and raw is what this page suggests for the sulfur chemistry. See GERD.

Anticoagulants, antiplatelets and surgery. Culinary shallots are fine on warfarin, a direct oral anticoagulant, clopidogrel or aspirin. Concentrated allium supplements should be cleared with your prescriber and stopped one to two weeks before planned surgery.

Botulism risk from alliums in oil. Alliums held in oil at room temperature create the anaerobic, low-acid conditions Clostridium botulinum requires; garlic-in-oil has caused documented outbreaks. Refrigerate shallot oil or confit immediately, use within a few days, or freeze.

Toxic to dogs and cats. All alliums cause oxidative damage to red blood cells in dogs and cats, producing Heinz-body haemolytic anaemia; cats are especially sensitive. Cooked shallots, shallot powder, fried crisps and leftovers all count. Contact a vet if a pet eats a meaningful quantity.

Key Research Papers

Each entry names the plant and the study type. Links are PubMed topic searches so you can see each paper alongside related work.

1. Shallot vs onion vs garlic, in vitro. Dankert J, Tromp TF, de Vries H, Klasen HJ. Antimicrobial activity of crude juices of Allium ascalonicum, Allium cepa and Allium sativum. Zentralblatt fur Bakteriologie, 1979. Find on PubMed
2. Shallot, in vitro. Amin M, Kapadnis BP. Heat stable antimicrobial activity of Allium ascalonicum against bacteria and fungi. Indian Journal of Experimental Biology, 2005. Find on PubMed
3. Shallot peel, in vitro. Mobin L, Haq MA, Ali R, et al. Antibacterial and antioxidant potential of the phenolic extract and its fractions isolated from Allium ascalonicum peel. Natural Product Research, 2022. Find on PubMed
4. Shallot, preliminary clinical. Arpornchayanon W, Klinprung S, Chansakaow S, et al. Antiallergic activities of shallot (Allium ascalonicum L.) and its therapeutic effects in allergic rhinitis. Asian Pacific Journal of Allergy and Immunology. Find on PubMed
5. Shallot, human cell culture. Chuljerm H, et al. Protective effects of shallot (Allium ascalonicum) extracts against PAH-induced oxidative stress in human nasal epithelial cells. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Find on PubMed
6. Shallot, preliminary. Saenthaweesuk S, et al. Antimicrobial and wound-healing properties of shallot, 2015. Find on PubMed
7. Mechanism, garlic. Ankri S, Mirelman D. Antimicrobial properties of allicin from garlic. Microbes and Infection, 1999. Find on PubMed
8. Genus review. Lanzotti V, Scala F, Bonanomi G. Compounds from Allium species with cytotoxic and antimicrobial activity. Phytochemistry Reviews, 2014. Find on PubMed
9. Chemistry review. Rose P, Whiteman M, Moore PK, Zhu YZ. Bioactive S-alk(en)yl cysteine sulfoxide metabolites in the genus Allium. Natural Product Reports, 2005. Find on PubMed
10. Antifungal, genus comparison. Yin MC, Tsao SM. Inhibitory effect of seven Allium plants upon three Aspergillus species. International Journal of Food Microbiology, 1999. Find on PubMed
11. Onion oil, in vitro. Zohri AN, Abdel-Gawad K, Saber S. Antibacterial, antidermatophytic and antitoxigenic activities of onion (Allium cepa L.) oil. Microbiological Research, 1995. Find on PubMed
12. Garlic, in vitro, H. pylori. O'Gara EA, Hill DJ, Maslin DJ. Activities of garlic oil, garlic powder, and their diallyl constituents against Helicobacter pylori. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 2000. Find on PubMed
13. Garlic, review. Sivam GP. Protection against Helicobacter pylori and other bacterial infections by garlic. The Journal of Nutrition, 2001. Find on PubMed
14. Garlic, Cochrane systematic review. Lissiman E, Bhasale AL, Cohen M. Garlic for the common cold. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2014. Find on PubMed
15. Garlic, randomized trial. Josling P. Preventing the common cold with a garlic supplement: a double-blind, placebo-controlled survey. Advances in Therapy, 2001. Find on PubMed
16. Aged garlic extract, randomized trial. Nantz MP, Rowe CA, Muller CE, et al. Supplementation with aged garlic extract improves both NK and gamma-delta T cell function and reduces the severity of cold and flu symptoms. Clinical Nutrition, 2012. Find on PubMed
17. Onion, review. Marefati N, et al. A review of anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and immunomodulatory effects of Allium cepa and its main constituents. Pharmaceutical Biology, 2021. Find on PubMed
18. Garlic, review. Arreola R, Quintero-Fabian S, Lopez-Roa RI, et al. Immunomodulation and anti-inflammatory effects of garlic compounds. Journal of Immunology Research, 2015. Find on PubMed

Live PubMed searches

1. Allium ascalonicum antimicrobial activity
2. Shallot antifungal and Candida
3. Allium thiosulfinates and minimum inhibitory concentrations
4. Quercetin, mast cells and histamine release
5. Occupational allium contact dermatitis
6. Allium toxicity in dogs and cats

Connections

• All Herbs
• Shallot Benefits hub — the evidence tiers and the species-confusion problem.
• Shallot (Allium ascalonicum) — botany, taxonomy, traditional use and culinary technique.
• Garlic: Antimicrobial Spectrum — the same chemistry in the allium that has actually been tested.
• Garlic: Immune Function and Cold — the Cochrane verdict in detail.
• Antibacterial Herbs — where allium chemistry sits among the wider plant antimicrobial literature.
• Allergic Rhinitis — the condition in the one shallot clinical study, and what actually treats it.
• Quercetin: Allergy and Histamine — the mast-cell mechanism behind the antiallergic claim.
• Staphylococcus aureus — a standard test organism in allium in-vitro work, and a reason not to self-treat.
• Escherichia coli — likewise.
• Helicobacter pylori — the plausible-on-paper target whose garlic trials did not deliver.
• Immunology — what "immune support" actually means clinically.
• Onions — the shallot's own species, and the source of the onion-oil antifungal work.

This page is educational and is not medical advice. Laboratory antimicrobial activity is not the same thing as an antibiotic, and nothing here supports treating an infection with shallots. Never delay antibiotics or medical assessment for a suspected bacterial infection — those illnesses worsen over hours, and delay is how people are harmed. Do not apply raw shallot to broken skin. If you take an anticoagulant or antiplatelet drug, or you have surgery planned, discuss concentrated allium supplements with your doctor or pharmacist.

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