Dear Reader
RESISTANT BACTERIA has become a very serious problem …. You must have read the scary stories in the papers about cases of MRSA in our hospitals and the inability of the “half gods in white” to cure their patients from it.
MRSA stands for Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus. What it really means, is that a type of very common bacteria has mutated into a form that hardly responds to any antibiotic available.
Today, I will try to shed some light on the history of antibiotics and the great success story behind them, but also the problems associated with them.
When we speak sceptically about the great success of modern medicine in the last 100 years, we often forget what life was like only a century ago. Life expectancy in rich countries in Europe and the US was just a little more than half of what it is today. The most common causes of death were neither heart attacks nor cancer, but infections. Often, the infections we treat today in GP’s surgery for a few days with antibiotics, like kidney infections or bronchitis, were the same infections that were killers 100 years ago.
You know that I am open to everything that helps and cures, but even I find it hard sometimes to stay neutral and relaxed when people come forward with, what I would call, an individual case report. This might concern themselves or perhaps a friend of a friend who has been cured by homeopathy or a wonder cure, where the conventional modern medicine could not help.
Boasts of great successes in modern medicine could, of course, be made in a much more convincing way. Millions of patients could praise their surgeons for having saved them from a certain and painful death from appendicitis. One hundred years ago, a lot of people died from appendicitis and infected wounds. Still, today, in parts of the world where children are not vaccinated against tetanus, it is a common cause of death. Thanks to the vaccination programmes, you will find very few doctors in Europe who have seen a case of tetanus during their career. And, have you ever heard of anybody saying they have been cured from appendicitis by homeopathy?
But back to where we started … Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin by accident, at the beginning of the 20th century, when he was working in a lab with certain bacteria and went on holiday without cleaning his desk. On his return, he found that a mould in some of the Petri dishes had prevented the growth of bacteria. He added two and two together, and found a cure for bacterial infection.
However, he himself did not manage to convert this discovery into a medication. It took until the Second World War for the first commercially available Penicillin to arrive. Since then, many antibiotics have been developed and new ones are always being launched.
The reason why we need more and more antibiotics is because certain bacteria get used to the harmful effect they have on them, and develop strategies to survive antibiotic attacks. This process of adaptation is also called developing a resistance to an antibiotic, and it is this resistance that we doctors are afraid of. If we get more and more bacteria that are multiresistant, like MRSA, then we could go back 100 years, when patients died from what we would nowadays call simple infection, like kidney and lung infections.
Multiresistant bacteria can only be avoided by logical usage of antibiotics.
A rational and sensible approach is the following:
• Only use an antibiotic when you suspect a bacterial infection, and the infection is not self limiting.
•There is no such thing as a mild antibiotic. There are antibiotics for certain bacteria. It is best to treat infections forcefully in the first instance, in order to kill the bacteria quickly, which avoids them getting used to the antibiotic.
• Make sure that antibiotics are not sold over the counter, as has recently become custom in southern European countries, like Greece and Spain. These countries have a much higher rate of multiresistant bacteria than countries in the north of Europe, where antibiotics are generally used according to the rules.
• Educate the public about the pros and cons of the usage of antibiotics and alternative treatments.
The way antibiotics work is a bit like throwing a bomb onto a battlefield. The bad guys get killed, but so do a lot of good guys.
A probiotic, like UL 250 and Actimel, works with a lot of good guys, which are sent onto the fighting ground. Too many good guys make it difficult for the bad guys to breathe.
Unfortunately, the scale of the problem with infections that are unresponsive to the usual antibiotics is already large, but is mainly restricted to hospitals, where there is an ideal feeding ground for resistant strains of germs. However, many hospitals are now screening every patient before admission to see if they are carrying MRSA. These measures became necessary because it is estimated that many thousands of patients die each year from MRSA in many European countries.
But there is no reason to panic. Antibiotics are great lifesavers, but I would like you to bear my article in mind when you next go to your doctor with a chest infection or flu. Consider him a good doctor and advocate for your health and wellbeing, when he says: “It is a virus, an antibiotic will not help, in fact; it could even harm you.”
Dear Reader, please enjoy the wonderful summer, but be careful with the sun. You know it could make you very wrinkly early in life!
Very best wishes,
Yours,
Dr Thomas Kaiser
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