Today came yet more alarming news on the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics, especially among children. Some scientists are predicting that it won’t be long before mutating microbes are so resistant to modern antibiotics that there is a real danger of reverting to the situation in the pre-antibiotic age in the 1920s and 30s when some illnesses considered curable nowadays were usually fatal.

How has this come about?

Allopaths have two main weapons in their armoury for dealing with deadly microbes – vaccinations and antibiotics.

Vaccinations are designed to strengthen the body’s immunity against microbes. Although there is evidence of their use in the Orient two thousand years ago, their rediscovery by Edward Jenner in the 18^th century bore all the hallmarks of the scientific method – observation, deduction, testing, verification and so on.

Antibiotics are intended to kill targeted bacteria stone dead, and can be very effective. But over-reliance on them causes more problems than it solves. Firstly, there’s a great deal of evidence that they weaken the natural immune system in the long term (vaccinations do too); secondly, they destroy not only the harmful bacteria, but the beneficial ones too; thirdly (and more scarily) overuse of antibiotics indirectly creates germs that are even more deadly than those they eliminate. Microbes aren’t stupid. When threatened by an antibiotic, they mutate.

Over-prescription of antibiotics, especially among children, coupled with their extensive use in agriculture (especially cattle) has led to this worrying future.

Ironically, most microbes are actually good for us and a reasonable standard of hygiene coupled with a healthy immune system deals with most ‘threats’.

Moreover, commercial interests use them to scare people. Consider the swine flu scare of 2008. Fuelled by fear and panic that the world was about to be overrun by killer bugs, governments spent huge sums on anti-flu vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies reaped huge profits, and then it became clear that it was all a storm in a teacup. Many health experts believe the whole episode was nothing short of a scandal, and some even suggested a fraudulent conspiracy between pharmaceutical companies and the World Health Organisation.

The time is rapidly coming when radical new treatments will be required, approaches that stimulate the human immune system without disturbing the balance of nature.

©David Lawrence Preston, 16.3.2016

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