Antibiotics They’re all around us !

Antibiotics have had a major and substantial impact on the preservation and longevity of human life since they were first discovered. That is not what we take issue with - but rather the over use and prevalence of antibiotics as a cure all. And no sooner would you have finished playing mas than you would find yourself rushing to the doctor for a flu or stomach bug that would lead to a course of this stuff.

Antibiotics in all forms existed as far back as Ancient Greece, India, and Babylonia where sour milks, molds and even moldy breads were used to treat infections. The discovery of antibiotics in their refined form today (a result of a succession of smaller discoveries between 1640 and 1932) is the most significant event in Western medical history. But today, over two million people annually are infected by antibiotic resistant bacteria and as many as 23,000 people die as a result of these infections.

So you think to yourself “Well, I will limit my use of these potent drugs and I’ll be fine.”

Michael Pollan, author of four New York Times bestsellers: Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (2010); In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008); The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) and The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001) had his gut microbiome sequenced before and after one course of antibiotics from his dentist and noted this: “One of the more striking results from the sequencing of my microbiome was the impact of a single course of antibiotics on my gut community. My dentist had put me on a course of Amoxicillin as a precaution before oral surgery. (Without prophylactic antibiotics, of course, surgery would be considerably more dangerous.) Within a week, my impressively non- Western “alpha diversity” — a measure of the microbial diversity in my gut — had plummeted and come to look very much like the American average. My (possibly) healthy levels of prevotella had also disappeared, to be replaced by a spike in bacteroides (much more common in the West) and an alarming bloom of proteobacteria, a phylum that includes a great many weedy and pathogenic characters, including E. coli and salmonella. What had appeared to be a pretty healthy, diversified gut was now raising expressions of concern among the microbiologists who looked at my data.”

Wrong! Martin Blaser, a physician and microbiologist at New York University speaks with alarm on the damage that antibiotics is doing to our bodies, even in small doses. “Farmers have been performing a great experiment for more than 60 years,” Blaser says, “by giving sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to their animals to make them gain weight.” The unfortunate aspect of this is that scientists have found antibiotic residues in meat, milk and surface water as a result of this.