Overcoming The Superbug Epidemic
“First do no harm.”
This statement has always been attributed to Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. Although Hippocrates did not say these exact words, it is the essence of the Hippocratic Corpus – a collection of medical treatises from the Greek Classical Period. This well-known dictum is the general principle by which doctors swear when they take the Hippocratic Oath.
Whether knowingly or unknowingly, however, doctors have been doing harm to their patients by promoting the interests of Big Pharma, which, needless to say, are oftentimes not in the best interest of the patients.
If you have heard of the current superbug epidemic, then you would know the big role that Big Pharma and doctors have played in this extremely serious health issue. There is no delicate way to say it – they created the problem.
The Undoing of Modern Medical Advancement
The era of modern medicine began when antibiotics were first discovered – a discovery that would also become its undoing.
The impact of this discovery to the world of health and medicine was no less than revolutionary. This fact cannot be underestimated. Infections that once wiped out entire populations suddenly became easy to cure. The succeeding decades saw one medical breakthrough after another because of antibiotics: successful organ transplants, chemotherapy, and miracle drugs that completely eradicated so many diseases (at least, in the western world), just to name a few.
But the continued and widespread use of antibiotics combined with the continued development of new and better drugs came at a price.
Bacteria also evolved, adapting themselves to the antibiotic agents that were meant to kill them and developing resistance to these agents. And so the age of superbugs began.
Perhaps the scientists did not foresee such a catastrophe; or perhaps they did realize the amazing adaptive and mutating capabilities of bacteria early on, but they felt confident enough that they could simply continue creating better agents to fight them.
Either way, they realized too late that their strategy of developing new drugs to fight off newly evolved and resistant strains of bacteria was only making the situation worse – because the bacteria kept pace with every pharmaceutical progress, and they kept pace effectively. New incarnations of bacteria invulnerable to the new drugs just kept appearing; meanwhile, scientists were running low on new, synthetic drug options.
This excerpt from Harvardmagazine.com effectively sums up the current superbug problem:
Recently, signs have arisen that the ancient relationship between humans and bacteria is ripe for another change. New drugs are scarce, but resistant bacteria are plentiful. Every year, in the United States alone, they cause two million serious illnesses and 23,000 deaths, reflected in an estimated $20 billion in additional medical costs. “For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about ‘ The end of antibiotics, question mark,’ ” said one official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on PBS’s Frontline last year. “ Well, now I would say you can change the title to ‘ The end of antibiotics, period.’ ” (Source: harvardmagazine.com)
Superbugs Are The Future
Superbugs are a health problem of epidemic proportions and it’s high time that we looked for a solution in the right places.
It’s high time that we started looking within the natural environment, and exploring its still largely untapped medicinal possibilities and benefits. The more Big Pharma and the scientists and other health and medical experts that serve its interests insist on pushing their money-driven agenda and creating synthetic medicines, the bigger the likelihood that superbugs will be our future. Scary prospect, isn’t it?
A recent article makes an exciting revelation that could be the game-changer that we desperately need.
Yes, there is a natural cure for antibiotic-resistant superbugs: bacteriophages.
According to the article, “Bacteriophages (“bacteria eaters”), commonly called phages, are viruses that infect bacteria but not humans. Found in water, soil, and even your digestive tract, phages dwell wherever bacteria are found because they rely on them to reproduce. They drill through a bacterium’s surface, hijack its DNA, and then replicate themselves within it until the cell bursts.
Phage injecting its genome into bacteria – graphic by Thomas Splettstoesser scistyle.com
Cocktails of phage viruses can kill a bacterial infection in the human body with remarkable accuracy, taking out only the infiltrators and leaving important populations of “good” bacteria intact—unlike the blunt tool of antibiotics, which tend to wipe out a wide swath of good bugs and bad. (Article: A Cure Exists For Antibiotic-Resistant Infections. So Why Are Thousands Of Americans Still Dying? By Koren Wetmore, January 2015)
So why aren’t medical and health experts using bacteriophages to cure the millions of people suffering from superbug infections and related illnesses and saving their lives? The article also reveals the disheartening answer: “Phages are expensive to test because they don’t adhere to the Western “one size fits all” treatment paradigm.
Rather, they are custom remedies made from naturally occurring viruses, applied in ways specific to the particular strains of bacteria each patient is suffering from. It’ll take leaps of time and technology to turn them into prescription drugs.”
In most of the western world, it all goes back to how Big Pharma can make big money out of a new product. Indeed, scientists in the U.S. are already looking into the great curative potential of bacteriophages.
But they are still more focused on engineering these phages to make them “more compatible with drug regulations” and “patentable and possibly more appealing to a pharmaceutical company that wants to protect an investment of potentially millions of dollars in product development.”
We Must Take Matters Into Our Own Hands
“Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating,” says Keiji Fukuda, head of health security at the WHO. (Source: www.newscientist.com)
The WHO is right in saying that we must “take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections.” They should have taken their cautionary advice further and emphasized the importance of maintaining good health, specifically through healthy eating, in order to prevent infections.
Did you know that one of the major risk factors for superbug infections is the eating of infected livestock/produce?
Click For Large View
This is especially true for livestock reared through intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, and for commercially farmed produce. It has to do with how superbugs are actually allowed to replicate unchecked. This excerpt from the same Newscientist.com article mentioned above explains it best:
“When an infection is treated, bacteria with genes that code for enzymes that destroy or exclude the drug survive. There may be too few of these to matter at first, but if enough bacteria repeatedly encounter the antibiotic, the resistant ones can have enough selective advantage to eventually dominate the population. This happens when the drugs are used too widely or to boost growth in livestock.” (Source: www.newscientist.com)
MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), one of the most dangerous superbugs that has evolved to date, is often found in and transmitted to humans from industrially farmed livestock.
In the Wikipedia article on MRSA, it is mentioned that “A 2011 study reported 47% of the meat and poultry sold in surveyed U.S. grocery stores was contaminated with S. aureus, and of those, 52% — or 24.4% of the total — were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. “Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer,” said Dr. Keim, a co-author of the paper. Some samples of commercially sold meat products in Japan were also found to harbor MRSA strains.” (Source: en.wikipedia.org)
When we can’t depend on health and medical experts to keep us safe from the superbug epidemic, how can we take matters into our hands? By eating healthy.
The superbug epidemic is only one of the many reasons why we should add more natural/organic foods to our diet. Needless to say, naturally/organically grown food products carry very little to no risk of transmitting a superbug to humans. Additionally, having a healthier diet boosts our ability to resist and fight off infections. Θ
