Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (5 page)

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.

What is more, as bacteria gain resistance, they pass that knowledge on to
all
forms of bacteria they meet. They are not competing with each other for resources, as standard evolutionary theory predicted, but rather promiscuously cooperating in the sharing of survival information. “More surprising,” one research group commented, “is the apparent movement of genes, such as
tetQ
and
ermB
between members of the normal microflora of humans and animals, populations of bacteria that differ in species composition.”
¹⁷
Anaerobic and aerobic, Gram-positive and Gram-negative, spirochetes and plasmodial parasites, all are exchanging resistance information—something that, prior to antibiotic usage, was never known to occur (and contributing to a growing recognition that nature may not be red in tooth and claw but much more mutualistic and interdependently connected than formerly supposed). The recognition, long delayed by incorrect assumptions about the nature of the genome, is now widespread—genetic structures in all organisms are not static but fluid, sometimes along a wide range. Barbara McClintock, who early recognized the existence of transposons, noted in her 1983 Nobel lecture that the genome “is a highly sensitive organ of the cell, that in times of stress can initiate its own restructuring and renovation.”
²²
She noted as well that the instructions for how the genotype reassembled came from not only the organism but the environment itself. The greater the stress, the more fluid and specific the action of the genome in responding to it.

Research, new since the first edition of this book, has borne out McClintock's observations with a vengeance. The genome of an organism is stored in its DNA. It turns out that antibiotics often damage bacterial DNA through boosting production of free-radical oxygen molecules inside the bacteria. In other words this highly flexible organ of the cell is partially corrupted by antibiotics. Once that occurs the organism immediately begins repairing the damage. The bacteria begins to reweave the DNA, including the genomic structure encoded within it. Part of the data that informs those repair processes is the factors that caused the damage. So the bacteria literally restructure the genome in such a way as to counteract the damaging event. And since the damaging event
is
the antibiotic creation of free radicals, the bacteria develop resistance to
all
antibiotics that create free radicals.

Resistant bacteria tend to specialize in what part of the body they infect.
Enterococcus
,
Pseudomonas
,
Staphylococcus
, and
Klebsiella
bacteria take advantage of surgical procedures to infect surgical wounds or patients' blood in hospitals.

It turns out that staph bacteria need the iron that occurs naturally in blood cells, and the organisms prefer one kind of blood—ours. Anyplace where human blood is widely available, staph organisms congregate in large numbers.
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 the organisms keep learning.

Effluent streams from cities, filled with excreted antibiotics and resistant staph organisms, flow into the seas surrounding cities. Resistant staph is endemic in all oceans abutting land masses—and the adjoining beaches. It also learned how to transmit itself from person to person during sex. Welcome to the newest STD.

Haemophilus
,
Pseudomonas
,
Staphylococcus
,
Klebsiella
, and
Streptococcus
infect lung tissue, many times gaining access by hitching a ride on infected breathing tubes, oh-so-carefully inserted into patients by hospital staff. The bacteria cause pneumonia, often untreatable, in elderly patients in hospitals and nursing homes. Once known as the old person's friend (because it, relatively gently, eased the old into death), pneumonia was significantly reduced through antibiotic use but is now making a comeback as a leading cause of death in the elderly.

Pseudomonas
and
Klebsiella
, traveling into urinary passageways on nurse-inserted catheters, initiate serious or intransigent urinary tract infections in many patients. They also gain entry into female nurses' urinary tracts through poor hygiene, where they rapidly mutate under the pressure of the free antibiotics dispensed to such hospital personnel. (Most nurses' and physicians' hands are covered in resistant bacteria whether they wash or not—hand disinfection and hand washing are not the same thing.)

Haemophilus
and
Streptococcus
initiate serious ear infections (sometimes leading to meningitis) in pediatric wards, which multiple rounds of antibiotics often fail to cure. These organisms can also cause debilitating infections of the GI tract accompanied by severe, unremitting diarrhea. And they are not alone in this. One of the newer, more dangerous infectious organisms of the GI tract is
Clostridium difficile
. As the Infectious Diseases Society of America reports, “The rate of infections caused by
Clostridium difficile
in U.S. hospitals doubled between 2000 and 2003. Outbreaks of severe
C. difficile
disease among hospital patients and clusters of unusually severe
C. difficile
disease among previously low-risk patients have been reported from multiple states. Many of the changes in the behavior of this infection appear due to the spread of an epidemic strain of
C. difficile
with increased virulence and increased resistance to commonly used fluoroquinolone antimicrobials.”
²⁴

According to the CDC, there were four times as many deaths from this disease in 2004 as there were in 1999. The organism has become so difficult to treat with antibiotics that Western doctors are turning to a new treatment: fecal transplants. Yes, you heard that right, they put someone else's poop into your bowel in hopes that a healthy bowel population might just reestablish itself. The new poop is fed into the body through a tube in the patient's nose. (This is
modern
medicine.)

Tuberculosis (TB) is increasingly resistant and is spreading in inner cities, homeless shelters, and prisons. About two billion people worldwide are thought to have latent TB, about one in three people. Two hundred million of those will become infectious (15 million in the United States) while three million a year will die. About 80 percent of those infected show some signs of antibiotic resistance. Two percent, or 40 million people worldwide, currently have an untreatable, resistant strain. TB is, in fact, becoming so difficult to treat that older approaches, such as surgical removal of the diseased lung, are sometimes being utilized.

Gonorrhea has reemerged with a potent resistance it learned in brothels in Vietnam among prostitutes who were regularly given daily courses of antibiotics. It now causes 700,000 infections in the United States each year. Malaria, spread by mosquitos and once considered only a disease of the tropics, kills one million people a year worldwide and is resistant to pharmaceuticals over 85 percent of the time.

Cholera has also learned resistance to a number of antibiotics through improper dosing by physicians. Even more telling, it has learned resistance to the primary drug used to kill it in the wild—chlorine. Chlorine, though naturally present in the ecosystem, rarely exists in pure form. Generally, it is chemically bonded to something else, as in such things as table salt (sodium chloride). Industrial production is around 50 million pounds a year of chemically pure chlorine. It is used in products such as organochlorines (e.g., the PVCs used in medicine) and, commonly, in water supplies as an antimicrobial disinfectant. Both cholera and
E. coli
have developed resistance to chlorine as a result. Dangerous in and of itself but more so because
E. coli
, exposed to such large numbers of antibiotics in the human GI tract, is one of the principal bacteria that learns resistance and passes it on. This information exchange is especially easy with other types of GI tract bacteria, especially if they are Gram-negative, which cholera is. In 2000, when the first documented outbreak of simultaneous infection by enterotoxigenic
E. coli
and cholera occurred in India, both were resistant organisms.

Cholera lives in water, usually near human settlements, in a quiescent state between epidemics. During these lulls cholera encounters not only chlorine but the scores of other antibiotics that flow in sublethal doses into nearly all water supplies on Earth. Resistance determinants are widely shared between multiple serotypes of cholera. Like all pathogenic bacteria, the resistance curve of cholera organisms is exponential. In 1992, only 35 percent of cholera O1 serotypes were resistant to ampicillin. By 1997, 100 percent were.

Cholera epidemics tend to emerge in human populations when the fecal content of waste streams from population centers is high. The
organisms follow the effluent upstream, seeking its source. They usually find it.

Antimicrobial pressure has caused
E. coli
, not normally pathogenic, to also develop unexpected virulence capacities in such forms as the potentially deadly
E. coli
O157:H7. Epidemiologists now know, through genetic markers, that it was taught its virulence by
Shigella
bacteria. Researcher and physician Marguerite Neill, a specialist in infectious medicine, observes that judicious reflection on the meaning of this finding suggests a larger significance—that
E. coli
O157:H7 is a messenger, bringing an unwelcome message that “in mankind's battle to conquer infectious diseases, the opposing army is being replenished with fresh replacements.”
²⁵

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. These antibiotics and resistant bacteria flow into the environment and spread everywhere. As Julie Gerberding of the Centers for Disease Control comments, “Once restricted to hospitals, where seriously ill patients are exposed to constant infusions of drugs, these [resistant bacteria] are now being found in the community.”
²⁶