Antibiotics Resistance Quotes

Another existential threat to human life caused by UPF but not mentioned on the packaging is antibiotic resistance.

Invasive plants—Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.

It doesn’t matter anyway!” Patrick couldn’t sit down. He couldn’t. “It’s not like sex is anything to shout about! It’s icky, and the guy never wants to wear a condom, and I have to give a frickin’ health and safety lesson every time I give a blow job because they think I’m stupid, and I know you can get shit from giving head, and I’m not putting that thing in my mouth unless I get a written fucking guarantee that it’s not going to drop off or explode or give me some life-threatening disease or mutant antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea!

As long as amoxicillin is given to our children who have pneumococci in their noses and throats, whether harmless or not, antibiotic resistance is inevitable.

...whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water -- of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don't care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.

It's no joke that hospitals are now often referred to as the worst place to get well. Superbugs are looking out the hospital windows, licking their chops at the feast that awaits them in this era of superbugs without borders.

I bit my lip. "I just think they're dangerous, that's all." "Dangerous? Like antibiotic resistance? And...umm... SHARKS?" I kicked him softly. "You know what I mean, I think they're dangerous for, like, society.

With few, if any, new classes of antibiotics in clinical development,674 an expert on antibiotic resistance at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy warned that “we’re sacrificing a future where antibiotics will work for treating sick people by squandering them today for animals that are not sick at all.

The prodigious production of antibacterial soaps that end up going into the water are stimulating resistance among many classes of bacteria as well.

The majority of the antibiotics produced in the world go not to human medicine but to prophylactic usage on the farm.1336 This may generate antibiotic resistance.

Seven people with MRSA-infected wounds were treated with honey after antibiotics failed to eradicate the infection. All were successfully treated.

If more doctors understood Darwinism, humanity would not now be facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance.

The World Health Organization has named antibiotic resistance as one of the three major health problems of the new century.

One of the most important things to remember in treating Gram-negative infections is that the use of a synergist will significantly increase the impact of the herbs on the bacteria.

for bacteria do not develop resistance to plant medicines. They can’t. For plants have been dealing with bacteria a great deal longer than the human species has even existed, some 700 million years.

A ubiquitous phrase encountered in obituaries is “died from complications following surgery,” but what is not well understood is that these “complications” are quite frequently multi-drug resistant infections. —

A chronic wound in a patient with dystrophis epidermolysis bullosa was treated. The wound, despite many treatments, had never closed in 20 years. A honey-impregnated dressing closed and healed the wound in 15 weeks.

The main herbs to treat MRSA are cryptolepis, sida, alchornea, bidens, black pepper, the berberines, usnea, juniper berry, isatis, licorice, ginger, ashwagandha, echinacea, red root, reishi, honey, and Artemisia annua.

In the past twenty years, that feeling of mastery has turned to growing fear, fear that antibiotics are losing their efficacy. The excessive and improper use of antibiotics has imparted resistance on the bugs they used to kill.

The National Academy of Sciences once estimated that a total ban on the widespread feeding of antibiotics to farm animals would raise the price of poultry anywhere from one to two cents per pound and the price of pork or beef around three to six cents a pound, costing the average meat-eating American consumer up to $9.72 a year.1357 Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States cost an estimated $30 billion every year1358 and kill ninety thousand people.

In fact, other than factory farms, hospitals and doctors’ offices are the primary breeding ground of superbugs. A simple injection or a minor surgery can now, fairly routinely, lead to months in the hospital, or loss of limb, or loss of life.

Or as Steven Projan of Wyeth Research puts it, bacteria “are the oldest of living organisms and thus have been subject to three billion years of evolution in harsh environments and therefore have been selected to withstand chemical assault.”10

The primary herbs used to treat streptococcal bacteria are cryptolepis, sida, alchornea, bidens (though you’ll need to use larger doses, for longer), the berberine plants, juniper, usnea, lomatium, honey, echinacea, licorice, ginger, and red root.

Staphylococcus organisms are “the leading cause of pus-forming skin and soft tissue infections, the leading cause of infectious heart disease, the number one hospital acquired infection, and one of the four leading causes of food-borne illness.”23​➔​ And

Salmonella, which is now genetically lodged in the ovaries (and hence the eggs that come from them) of many agribusiness chickens, can survive refrigeration, boiling, basting, and frying. To kill salmonella bacteria the egg must be fried hard or boiled for 9 minutes or longer.

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome: the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions: improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

Rather than say that the bacterium gained resistance to the antibiotic, we would be more correct to say that it lost its sensitivity to it. It lost information. . . . Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time.

Indeed, antibiotic resistance, a fear predicted by Alexander Fleming when accepting his Nobel Prize for penicillin, is a huge concern for many infectious bacterial diseases in the twenty-first century and has been described as a ‘ticking time bomb’ and the greatest ‘global threat’ of our time.

Bacteria evolved mechanisms that could inactivate, block, or excrete various antibiotics. Moreover, bacteria transferred genetic determinants for these resistances between species and aggregated different resistances together on transmissible DNA elements known as resistance plasmids or R factors.

Piperine Warning Under no circumstances should you use piperine for severe intestinal infections such as E. coli O157:H7 or cholera. Piperine increases intestinal permeability, which can allow the resistant organisms access to the interior of your body in significantly greater numbers. It can make you much sicker.

Nevertheless, the drugging of America continues—one Mayo Clinic study concluded that nearly seven out of ten Americans are taking prescription drugs, and a whopping 20 percent take five or more! (Zhong, et al, 2013) This includes millions of courses of antibiotics that have spawned life-threatening, drug-resistant microbes.

To avoid this infiltration the bacteria alter the permeability of their cell membranes, often by altering the structure of the doorways that let outside substances into the cell. This makes it harder, or impossible, for antibiotics to sneak in — essentially keeping the level of the drug below that needed to affect the bacteria.

Sometimes bacteria learn how to live and prosper in antimicrobial environments, such as the cleaning solutions in hospitals. As one journal article put it, “Contamination, mainly by Gram-negative bacteria, was found in 10 freshly prepared solutions and in 21 of 22 at discard.”15​➔​ Sometimes, they even learn to use the antibiotics for food.

the only published human feeding experiment revealed that the genetic material inserted into GM soy can transfer into the bacteria living inside our intestines and continue to function. This means that long after we stop eating GMO foods with an antibiotic gene, we may still have this gene inside us, creating antibiotic-resistant superdiseases.

Hospitals, where large numbers of pathogenic bacteria and antibiotics come into frequent contact, give bacteria the most opportunity to develop resistance and virulence. Researchers examining the effluent streams from hospitals have found them to contain exceptionally large numbers of resistant bacteria as well as large amounts of excreted antibiotics.

Importantly, Haemophilus are what are called fastidious bacteria, meaning they need an iron source to grow, and unlike most other bacteria, they usually get it from the hemoglobin in our blood to which iron is bonded (giving blood its red color). Protecting the blood cells through the use of something like sida is crucial in treating this kind of infection.

A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well. Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies, and via the meat those animals get turned into.

Children are most susceptible to ear infections from antibiotic-resistant strains of Haemophilus influenzae, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Branhamella catarrhalis. The following kinds of remedies have been found highly effective for treating them, individually or together. These kinds of ear infections often accompany flus and colds; this will help if they do. How

The speedy evolution of antibiotic resistance is not surprising, because bacteria multiply fast and are present in enormous numbers, so that any mutation that can make a cell resistant is sure to occur in a few bacteria in a population; if the bacteria are able to survive the change to their cell functions caused by the mutation and to multiply, a resistant population can rapidly build up.

The fairly recent discovery that all of the water supplies in the industrialized countries are contaminated with minute amounts of antibiotics (from their excretion into water supplies) means that bacteria everywhere are experiencing low doses of antibiotics all the time. This exposure is exponentially driving resistance learning; the more antibiotics that go into the water, the faster the bacteria learn.

Because Gram-positive bacteria have only a single cell wall, even though it’s thicker, they are, in general, much easier to treat. With Gram-negative bacteria, two cell walls have to be penetrated, not just one. In essence, the bacteria have two chances to identify and deactivate an antibacterial that is hostile to them. Even if an antibiotic gets into the periplasmic space, it usually will not kill the bacteria. It still has to penetrate the second wall.

When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful among them. We lose the synergy when we take out the solitary compound. But most important, we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine. The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plants, may be our best hope for confronting drug-resistant bacteria.

Another way is via genetic engineering. Here the germ is inserted into plasmid that has been manipulated by scientists. This type of plasmid is circular segments of DNA extracted from bacteria to serve as a vector. Scientists can add multiple genes and whatever genes they want into this plasmid. In case of vaccines, this includes a genetic piece of the vaccine germ and normally a gene for antibiotic resistance. This means that when the toxic gene is cultured inside the yeast, it has been designed with a new genetic code that makes it resistant to the antibiotic it’s coded for. The gene-plasmid combo is inserted into a yeast cell to be replicated. When the yeast replicates, the DNA from the plasmid is reproduced as a part of the yeast DNA. Once enough cells have been replicated, the genetic material in the new and improved yeast cell is extracted and put into the vaccine. Examples of this vaccine are the acellular pertussis and hepatitis B vaccines. One thing that doesn’t seem to concern scientists is the fact that the manmade genetic combination becomes the vaccine component. This mixture of intended and unintended genetic information may cause our immune system to overreact. This can be especially complicated for a child with compromised immune system. Another concern is that this new genetic code can become integrated with our own genetic material. Yeast, for instance, is very much like human DNA. It shares about one third of our proteins.

Scientists suspect that by eating chicken and other meat, women infect their lower intestinal tract with these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can then creep up into their bladder.1182 Commonsense hygiene measures to prevent UTIs have included wiping from front to back after bowel movements and urinating after intercourse to flush out any infiltrators. Commenting on this body of research, Science News suggested meat avoidance as an option to “chicken out” of urinary tract infections.

There is no doubt that the widespread consumption of antibiotic-laden meat is bad for us. Ample evidence fingers this massive drug use in our meat industries as a key contributor to one of the biggest health concerns of the modern era, the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, aka superbugs. This is not some future science fiction. It is killing people right now—lots of people. The CDC called antibiotic resistance one of the five greatest health threats facing the nation, and new drug-resistant

antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop resistance. What you are left with after a course of antibiotics, after all, are the most resistant microbes. By attacking a broad spectrum of bacteria, you stimulate lots of defensive action. At the same time, you inflict unnecessary collateral damage. Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost.

Enterococcal organisms cause urinary tract infections, bacteremia, bacterial endocarditis, diverticulitis, and meningitis. The primary herbs to treat them are sida, alchornea, cryptolepis, bidens, ginger, echinacea, juniper berry, usnea, Artemisia annua, honey (I know, it’s not exactly an herb), licorice, oregano oil, and Acacia aroma. If you are treating a really tough vancomycin-resistant enterococcal infection, add ginger juice to your formulation; it strongly inhibits resistance mechanisms in these bacteria.

A number of other studies have been conducted on the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and all have found comparable outcomes. For example: 60 people with limb-threatening diabetic infections were split into three groups: 1) full-thickness skin ulcer; 2) deep-tissue infection and osteomyelitis; 3) gangrenous lesions. All ulcers in group 1 healed and 92 percent of those in group 2 healed. All people in group 3 healed after surgical excision, debridement of necrotic tissue, and treatment with honey ointment (which also included royal jelly).

Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do." U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

And, irritatingly, bacteria are generating resistance to antibiotics we haven’t even thought of yet. For example, after placing a single bacterial species in a nutrient solution containing sublethal doses of a newly developed and rare antibiotic, researchers found that within a short period of time the bacteria developed resistance to that antibiotic and to twelve other antibiotics that they had never before encountered—some of which were structurally dissimilar to the first. Stuart Levy observes that “it’s almost as if bacteria strategically anticipate the confrontation of other drugs when they resist one.

You’re just living a normal life — never been sick, never been unhealthy, and all of a sudden you are fighting for your life. And this is happening to individuals every day,” Thomas said. The infection went to her blood stream and bone marrow and caused septic shock and organ failure. After undergoing multiple surgeries including a bone-marrow transplant and a “never-ending cycle of antibiotics,” she survived the ordeal.1​➔​ Thomas survived relatively intact. Some don’t, losing limbs in a desperate bid to stop the infection from spreading and then living permanently debilitated lives. Others aren’t even that “lucky.” Denis

It’s a demonic feedback loop. Let me see if I can get this straight. Pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms, which depend on them to maintain their abnormally intensive systems. The animals develop antibiotic resistance that spreads to humans. Humans need stronger drugs. In the meantime, the animal industries flood the government with cash in exchange for subsidies. The government, invested in keeping the generous animal food lobbies flush, runs federal programs pushing people to eat increasing amounts of animal-based foods. People oblige. People get sick, requiring medication for the rest of their lives, along with expensive medical procedures. The drugs and procedures falsely assure them that they can continue to eat the food that made them sick in the first place. People continue to support the animal agriculture industry by buying their products, which pay for studies to further convince the public that animal products are an essential part of a healthy diet. People continue to support the pharmaceutical companies because they are tethered to their prescription drugs. This allows drug companies to pay for the “education” of our doctors who prescribe more drugs to us. Then pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms…

When the drug vancomycin falls completely by the wayside, as it will, we may, just as Stephen predicts here and I have predicted elsewhere, fall back on the bimillennial biblical medicinal herbs such as garlic and onion. These herbs each contain dozens of mild antibiotic compounds (some people object to using the term “antibiotic” to refer to higher plant phytochemicals, but I do not share their disdain for such terminology). It is easy for a rapidly reproducing bug or bacterial species to outwit (out-evolve) a single compound by learning to break it down or even to use it in its own metabolism, but not so easy for it to outwit the complex compounds found in herbs.

Very few people are aware that infections from resistant bacteria, often picked up in hospitals during routine procedures, are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (In 1999 they were fourth.) Very few people know, as well, that the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies have stopped research and development on new antibiotics—there are virtually no new ones in the pipeline. Within the next few decades, we face, as many bacterial researchers have pointed out, the emergence of untreatable epidemic diseases more deadly than any known in history. Or as David Livermore, one of Britain’s primary bacterial resistance researchers, puts it . . . It is naive to think we can win.

Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. Dr. Fleming noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered, and in a 1945 New York Times interview, he warned that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria. Fleming’s observations were prescient. At the time of his interview just 14 percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria were resistant to penicillin; by 1953, as the use of penicillin became widespread, 64 percent to 80 percent of the bacteria had become resistant and resistance to tetracycline and erythromycin was also being reported. (In 1995 an incredible 95 percent of staph was resistant to penicillin.) By 1960 resistant staph had become the most common source of hospital-acquired infections worldwide.

The final misconception is that evolution is “just a theory.” I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that evolution is unproven, because (following an unuseful convention in the field) it is a “theory” (like, say, germ theory). Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.

We are not talking just about dollars and cents. We are talking about lives. Consider one chilling example: drug-resistant infections. As America’s breakthroughs in antibiotics recede into the past, bacteria are evolving to defeat current antibiotics. For more and more infections, we are plunging back into the pre-antibiotic era. In the United States alone, two million people are sickened and tens of thousands die each year from drug-resistant infections—mostly because private companies see little incentive to invest in the necessary research, and the federal government has failed to step in.87 Though federal funding for the National Institutes of Health ramped up in the mid-1990s, it has fallen precipitously since, cutting the share of young scientists with NIH grants in half in roughly six years.88 As one medical professor lamented recently: “In my daily work in both a university medical school and a public hospital, it’s a rare month that some bright young person doesn’t tell me they are quitting science because it’s too hard to get funded. . . . A decade or two from now, when an antibiotic-resistant bacteria or new strain of bird flu is ravaging humanity, that generation will no longer be around to lead the scientific charge on humanity’s behalf.”89

Plants have long been, and still are, humanity’s primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur — instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years — the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing — it doesn’t take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe — in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don’t cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do — one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.

The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.

Researchers have shown a renewed interest in essential oil as a means of combating antibiotic-resistant infections.

Oestra hoisted his eyebrows and hunched forward, elbows on the table. The kids running unlicensed games by the waterfront weren’t coming up with the usual take. One of the brothels had been hit by an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant syphilis; one of the youngest boys, a five-year-old, had it in his eyes. Burton’s neighbor to the north—an Earthbound branch of the Loca Griega—were seeing raids on their drug manufacturing houses. Burton listened with his eyelids at half-mast. Individually, no one event mattered much, but put together, they were the first few fat raindrops in a coming storm. Oestra knew it too.

With its broad use, weeds are now adapting by becoming glyphosate-resistant in the same way superbugs are becoming antibiotic-resistant.

But I believe Y. pestis has been modified into a superbug, one that is antibiotic resistant.

whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.

In the feces-covered facilities of many industrial operations, these grain-based diets necessitate the large-scale use of antibiotics (80 percent of all antibiotics in the United States alone) to simply prevent the animals from dying. This has significantly contributed to the global antibiotic-resistance crisis.

Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack. I put Flora’s book onto the Hard Stack, which included Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, two works by Svetlana Alexievich, and other books on species loss, viruses, antibiotic resistance, and how to prepare dried food. These were books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped. Still, I usually managed to read the books in my Hard Stack, eventually.

The development of antibiotics is one of the most successful stories in the history of medicine, but it is unclear whether its ending will be a completely happy one. Fleming prophetically warned in his 1945 Nobel lecture that the improper use of penicillin would lead to its becoming ineffective. The danger was not in taking too much; it was in taking too little to kill the bacteria but “enough to educate them to resist penicillin.

higher antimicrobial loads will result in a lower total pathogenic load but also a lower involvement of the immune system and therefore less immunity in the long run (as indeed has been empirically demonstrated in a number of experiments summarised in a sweeping review by Benoun (2016)). Thus, while rapid and aggressive antimicrobial treatment is sometimes appropriate, the long-term absence of ensuing CD4+ immunity is its cost.

As the use of antibiotics in farming (which promotes growth and prevents infection in the animals) has contributed to the mutation of drug-resistant infections, one way to give yourself a better chance is to only consume meat that has been raised on organic farms.

Arendt even believes to have identified danger signals “that man may be . . . on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come.”6 She assumes that all human activities, if viewed from a sufficiently remote point in the universe, would no longer appear as deeds but as biological processes. Accordingly, for an observer in outer space, motorization would resemble a biological mutation: the human body surrounds itself with a metal housing in the manner of a snail—like bacteria reacting to antibiotics by mutating into resistant strains.

When the meat animals and the meat birds and almost all the fish species that humans had consumed died out, there was a great deal of hand-wringing, of course, and widespread recognition that maybe, just maybe, our own behavior had had something to do with it, that the diseases wouldn’t have spread so quickly if the creatures hadn’t been packed thousands upon thousands together in feedlots or in dark and poorly ventilated sheds, if science hadn’t been taken so aggressively to extremes to make each carcass uniformly productive, if the number of species hadn’t been so greatly reduced, in turn drastically reducing resistance to disease, or if antibiotics hadn’t been used so frequently and so thoughtlessly, quietly paving the way for the pandemics.

antibiotics have become a routine part of animal care, and the microbes in the animals’ guts become resistant to them. We have been worrying about family doctors ‘overprescribing’, or giving antibiotics for viral infections (when they’re needed only for bacterial infections) for a long time. But this accounts for a trivially small amount of antibiotic use.

just as bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics, the flu virus is beginning to develop resistance to NAIs, specifically to oseltamivir: Spanakis N, Pitiriga V, Gennimata, V, et al. “A review of neuraminidase inhibitor susceptibility in influenza strains.” Expert Rev Anti Infect Ther 2014;12:1325–36. Nitsch-Osuch A, Brydak LB. “Influenza viruses resistant to neuraminidase inhibitors.” ACTA BP 2014;61:505–8. 77:

approximately 80% of the antibiotics that are produced are fed to animals used for food.[7] The use of antibiotics in animal agriculture and the resulting dissemination of antibiotics can contribute to antibiotic resistance in humans.

No matter that both colds and flu are the work of viruses, not bacteria, and antibiotics can’t touch them. Or that the majority of colds will burn themselves out in days or weeks, without risk to life or limb. As antibiotic resistance becomes an ever more serious problem, the pressure is on doctors to be judicious in their prescribing habits. There’s plenty of room for improvement. In the US in 1998, three-quarters of all the antibiotics doled out by primary care doctors were for five respiratory infections: ear infections, sinusitis, pharyngitis (sore throat), bronchitis and upper respiratory tract infections (URI). Of the 25 million people who went to their doctor about a URI, 30 per cent were prescribed antibiotics. Not so bad, you might think, until you realise that only 5 per cent of URIs are caused by bacteria. The same goes for sore throats; 14 million people were diagnosed with pharyngitis that year, and 62 per cent of them were given antibiotics. Only 10 per cent of them would have had bacterial infections. Overall, around 55 per cent of antibiotic prescriptions given out that year were unnecessary.

The primary herbs to use to treat the condition, listed in order of strength against the organism, are the berberine plants, cryptolepis, isatis, usnea, lomatium, licorice, and echinacea. Because juniper berry is active against C. perfringens, I would suggest its use for C. difficile as well.

The plant loves disturbed places, especially agriculturally disturbed fields, and actively tries to colonize cultivated land. It is allelopathic (toxic to other plants) and can reduce domesticated crops up to 50 percent once it invades a planted field. It is considered highly noxious in scores of countries just for that reason. The plant has very few natural predators. I like it.

Wherever antibiotics and overcrowded or ill animal life meet in large numbers, resistance cascades occur: nursing homes, day care centers, homeless shelters, prisons, inner cities, animal hospitals, and factory farming operations. But they aren’t the worst. In spite of the apparent cleanliness of hospitals, the white coats, the quiet voices, the surety of purpose, the truth is that there is no place on Earth that contains more resistant bacteria.

The alkaloids in cryptolepis are water soluble, but if the pH of the water is alkaline, the alkaloids will not dissolve well.

For there is no place else on Earth where so many sick people congregate. No place else where so many pathogenic bacteria congregate. And there is no place else where the bacteria will experience such a multiplicity of antibiotics.

tincture is the strongest form of the herb as medicine. The use of piperine as a synergist will increase the potency of the plant considerably.

you are treating a systemic infection by a Gram-negative bacteria, the use of an endotoxin scavenger and protectant is often important. Isatis (though not discussed in this book) is perhaps the best herb for this (ginger is also good). It should be included if endotoxin release may be a problem.

The tincture and the hot-water extract are the strongest medicinal forms of sida for internal use.

As Erich Fromm once commented: “Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”3​➔

consider this plant, along with alchornea, sida, and bidens, to be the primary systemic herbal antibiotics for use in treating resistant organisms at this time.

important. Isatis (though not discussed in this book) is perhaps the best herb for this (ginger is also good). It should be included if endotoxin release may be a problem.

The importance of systemic herbal antibacterials cannot be overstated.

Considerable research has taken place to determine the potential adverse reactions from using the plant, and none have been found,

For this plant to act as a potent antimicrobial, it must be prepared as a tincture of the fresh plant or the fresh juice must be used.

it may well be that many sidas contain similar constituents. If so, given their wide range, they would be one of the world’s most accessible systemic herbal antibacterials.

And the most dangerous place of all? Well, it’s your average hospital. For there is no place else on Earth where so many sick people congregate. No place else where so many pathogenic bacteria congregate. And there is no place else where the bacteria will experience such a multiplicity of antibiotics.

the paradox remains that we use far too many antibiotics, but we don’t have enough of the right ones to treat an emerging burden of these antibiotic-resistant infections.

You eye the burger with anticipation, and you don’t think about how the standard practice for cattle is to treat them prophylactically with antibiotics and dewormers, thereby breeding bacterial and parasite resistance and leading to the rise of superbugs, which can trigger hard-to-treat infections and foodborne illnesses.

HUMOR IS POWER." ~ Karyn Buxman, RN, neurohumorist __________________     Chapter 1 What’s NOT So Funny About Nursing?     12 hour shifts . . . Doctors with attitude . . . Cranky co-workers . . . Frequent flyers . . . Non-compliant patients . . . Frustrated administrators . . . Antibiotic-resistant superbugs . . . Healthcare reform . . . Disorganized supply closets . . . Dwindling budgets . . . Increasing workloads . . . Bad hospital coffee.

microbial resistance to antibiotics…

It is abundantly clear that our planet is warming. But not only the warming itself will change our world as we know it. We are already seeing changing weather patterns with extreme weather and droughts. We are already in the middle of three pandemics: The HIV/Aids pandemic is slowly retreating, the seventh cholera pandemic that started in the 1960s is still not under control, and the tuberculosis pandemic infects roughly one third of the human population. The World Health Organization warns about the spreading of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria with 900,000 cases each year. Microbiologists warn about the spreading of antibiotics-resistance genes in a great number of pathogenic bacteria, and they expect us to reach a point when antibiotics are no longer effective. Think of Victorian London with diseases like syphilis, cholera, typhus — there were no antibiotics available back then and a lot of people died a gruesome death.  What has disease to do with climate

(B) Raised seawater levels and heavy rainfalls, causing an elevation of groundwater levels, which resulted in (C) flooding of at least 63% of all sewer lines worldwide and substantial fluxes of faecal matter into aquifers, rivers, and lakes, contaminating all major drinking water resources. (D) Frequent long-distance travelling of Western and Central Europeans, North Americans, Australians, and Asians by air, sea, and land, facilitating the spreading of virulence factors and antibiotic resistance genes, and later, significantly accelerating the spreading of disease. (E) Use of large amounts of antibiotics (in the range of hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year), both for the treatment of disease and for industrial meat production, leading to antibiotics contamination of soils, aquifers, rivers, and lakes, and thus triggering bacterial multidrug-resistance in a great variety of ecosystems. (F) Spontaneous acquisition of an extremely potent virulence factor in a multidrug-resistant strain of V. cholerae, and (G) prevalence of various multidrug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis since the 21st century.

We live in a global village, Neel, where billions of voices babble simultaneously, and in this village a new hierarchy is being established, a new caste-system is being created. Only this time, it is money that sets the tone. Whoever has the most money buys the biggest loudspeaker and is the neo-Brahmin of this new world order. If the ninety-year-old neo-Brahmin on the other side of the earth is terrified of antibiotic resistant flesh-eating bacteria, we must think twice before offering treatment to a twenty-four-year old here. These are the new rules of our global village.

the Soviets developed a dry, antibiotic-resistant, environmentally stable variety of the plague organism. This brings us up to date and to the American CDC, who have now categorized weaponized plague as a Category A agent.

according to this colonel the nastiest form of weaponized pneumonic plague was developed in Russia, employing canisters that released it in a powdered form from cruise missiles. Hard to detect.” Karin’s voice faltered as she spoke. “It’s . . . horrendous what the human race can concoct. In aerosol form pneumonic plague reaches its zenith, the most terrible, easy-to-deploy world killer out there, all down to the contagiousness of the disease, its resistance to dozens of antibiotics and, at least up to early 2000, no vaccine was available to combat the aerosolized form.