Read Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria Online

Authors: Stephen Harrod Buhner

Tags: #Medical, #Health & Fitness, #Infectious Diseases, #Herbal Medications, #Healing, #Alternative Medicine

Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (6 page)

The prodigious production of antibacterial soaps that end up going into the water are stimulating resistance among many classes of bacteria as well. Even though resistance dynamics were well understood long before antibacterial soaps were allowed on the market, under pressure from corporations they were still allowed in the United States. And like all other antibacterial substances, they have begun to confer unique forms of resistance on the planet's bacteria. The fear of microbes, so thoroughly leveraged by television advertising, has only hastened the resistance problem. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, found that the average amount of the antibacterial component of such soaps, triclosan, increased in Americans' urine by 42 percent between 2003 and 2006. Studies have shown that the chemical encourages bacterial resistance and that it disrupts hormone levels in regular users. Triclosan is common in many toothpastes, in nearly all antibacterial soaps, and even on knives and cutting boards.

These circumstances have increased the rate of resistance in bacteria exponentially. In 1999, 95 percent of
E. coli
was susceptible to ciprofloxacin but that had dropped to 60 percent by 2006;
Acinetobacter
susceptibility decreased by 70 percent in just 4 years; 36 percent of
Staphylococcus
organisms were resistant in 1992 but by 2003 64 percent were—the usual exponential learning curves. But these are only part of the story.

Factory Farms: The Story Gets Worse

The use of antibiotics by factory farms and wide antibiotic use by veterinarians for our pets has created a similar bacterial evolution in fast-forward. At least half, if not more, of all antibiotics used in the United States goes to huge factory farm operations. This has generated tremendously potent and quick resistance in a large range of bacteria. As reporter Brandon Keim comments, “Much of it is used to treat diseases spread by industrial husbandry practices, or simply to accelerate growth. As a result, farms have become giant petri dishes for superbugs,
especially multidrug-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
or MRSA, which kills 20,000 Americans every year—more than AIDS.”
27

Nicols Fox comments in her exposé of the problem in her book
Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire
:

The conditions under which [farm animals were] raised presented all the conditions for infection and disease: the animals were closely confined; subjected to stress; often fed contaminated food and water; exposed to vectors (flies, mice, rats) that could carry contaminants from one flock to another; bedded on filth-collecting litter; and given antibiotics (which, ironically, made them more vulnerable to disease) to encourage growth as well as ward off other infections…. Every condition that predisposed the spread of disease from animal to human actually worsened. Farming became more intensive, slaughtering became more mechanical and faster, products were processed in even more massive lots, and distribution became wider.
28

As with human diseases, pathogenic animal bacteria have specialized:
E. coli
O157:H7 in beef,
Salmonella
in chicken eggs,
Campylobacter
in chickens,
Listeria
in deli meat. (And there are others such as
Cyclospora
,
Cryptosporidium
, and
Yersinia
). Like the resistant bacteria emerging from our hospitals, bacteria from factory farms spread quickly into the wider world. And while factory farm owners deny their practices have
anything
to do with the problem, the only place where antibiotic-resistant organisms genetically identical to those from factory farming operations don't yet seem to exist is in indigenous animals in the northern arctic regions.

One of the early pioneers in antibiotic resistance is Stuart Levy, a professor who runs the Levy Lab at the Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance at Tufts University School of Medicine. To trace the flow into the environment of resistant bacteria from farming operations, he took six groups of chickens and placed them 50 to a cage. Four cages were in a barn, two just outside. Half the chickens received food containing subtherapeutic doses of oxytetracycline. The feces of all the chickens as well as the farm family living nearby and farm families in the neighborhood were examined weekly. Within 24 to 36 hours of eating the first batch of antibiotic-containing food, the feces of the dosed chickens showed
E. coli
–resistant bacteria.
Soon the undosed chickens also showed
E. coli
that were resistant to tetracycline. But even more remarkable, by the end of 3 months, the
E. coli
of
all
chickens were also resistant to ampicillin, streptomycin, and sulfonamides
even though they had never been fed these drugs
. Still more startling: At the end of 5 months, the feces of the nearby farm family (who had had no contact with the chickens) contained
E. coli
resistant to tetracycline. By the sixth month their
E. coli
were also resistant to five other antibiotics. A similar but longer study in Germany found that this resistance eventually moved into the surrounding community—taking a little over 2 years.

At least half, if not more, of all antibiotics used in the United States goes to huge factory farms.

Salmonella
, which is now genetically lodged
in the ovaries
(and hence the eggs that come from them) of many agribusiness chickens, can survive refrigeration, boiling, basting, and frying. To kill salmonella bacteria the egg must be fried hard or boiled for 9 minutes or longer.
Listeria
in deli meat can survive refrigeration.
E. coli
can now live in both orange juice and apple juice—two acidic mediums that previously killed it. And a recent study (2011) found that nearly 50 percent of all store-bought meat and poultry tested were contaminated with staph, and over half the bacteria tested were resistant strains. Lance Price, the lead author of the study, remarked, “The fact that drug-resistant
S. aureus
was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling.”
29

These food-borne bacteria are moving with greater frequency into the human food chain and human populations. There were 23 recalls by the U.S. FDA in 2010 for contamination from
Salmonella, Listeria, Clostridium
,
E. coli
, and
Bacillus
organisms.

Recent research has found that one of the main vectors for the spread of resistant organisms into the general community is flies. At minimum, over 30,000 flies will visit a poultry farming operation within any 6-week period. Researchers who studied groups of flies from such operations found them to be infected with exactly the same
genetic variants of resistant bacteria as those found in the poultry wastes the flies were feeding on. This same phenomenon occurs at all large-animal factory farms, with both cattle and pigs.

The growth rate of resistance and virulence is so fast that 15 years ago Stuart Levy observed, “Some analysts warn of present-day scenarios in which infectious antibiotic-resistant bacteria devastate whole human populations…. This situation raises the staggering possibility that a time will come when antibiotics as a mode of therapy will only be a fact of historic interest.”
30
To people such as David Livermore, MD, at the Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory in London, it has now gone much further. “It is,” he says, “naive to think we can win.”
31

In the first edition of this book I noted that bacteria are, in fact, learning resistance to new antibiotics in only a few years instead of the decades that it took previously. At the time of this second edition, that span has lessened to 6 months to a year. As infectious disease specialist Brad Spellberg has commented, “Resistance is inevitable.”

Resistance in the Ecosystem

Though resistance in the bacteria affecting people and farm animals has been the most publicized and studied, these bacteria are not confined to people or their food animals. They move freely in the ecosystem and among species. Newer research has found that seagulls, and other birds, not only humans, are spreading resistant bacteria throughout the world. As Dr. Jeffrey Fisher, in his book
The Plague Makers
, notes:

The resistant bacteria that result from this reckless practice do not stay confined to the animals from which they develop. There are no “cow bacteria” or “pig bacteria” or “chicken bacteria.” In terms of the microbial world, we humans along with the rest of the animal kingdom are part of one giant ecosystem. The same resistant bacteria that grow in the intestinal tract of a cow or pig can, and do, eventually end up in our bodies.
32

This is especially true if antibiotics flow into water. This promotes the transmission of resistant traits throughout the environment because bacterial growth is high wherever water-related biofilms occur: on the surface of water, on stones in water, and in the sediment of ponds, rivers, and oceans. Antibiotics given to fish contact all these regions, as does the antibiotic-rich effluent from factory farms and human waste treatment facilities. Resistance transfers in these biofilm regions from domestic to wild bacteria and it tends to persist in these natural ecosystems.

Researchers Christian Daughton and Thomas Ternes report that “a number of stream surveys documented the significant prevalence of native bacteria that display resistance to a wide array of antibiotics including vancomycin. Isolates from wild geese near Chicago, Illinois, are reported to be resistant to ampicillin, tetracycline, penicillin, and erythromycin.”
33
Researchers have found 16 antibiotics commonly present in groundwater/surface waters that are detectable in the microgram-per-liter range. Some researchers report that these antibiotic compounds are showing genotoxicity; that is, they are affecting the integrity of genetic structures in other life-forms. Daughton and Ternes comment that this is indeed cause for concern, as the bacteria never seem to forget what has been done to them:

Indeed, the rampant, widespread (and sometimes indiscriminate) use of antibiotics, coupled with their subsequent release into the environment, is the leading proposed cause of accelerated spreading resistance among bacterial pathogens, which is exacerbated by the fact that resistance is maintained even in the absence of continued selective pressure (an irreversible occurrence). Sufficiently high concentrations could also have acute effects on bacteria. Such exposures could easily lead to altered microbial community structures in nature and thereby affect the higher food chain.
34

Salmon, catfish, and trout—all raised commercially—are heavily dosed with antibiotics and other drugs, which are often blended into their food. As the food gets wet, the antibiotics begin to leach into the water. Commercial salmon, unlike catfish and trout, are raised in the open sea in pens, speeding the flow of antibacterials throughout
the oceans. Because of crowded conditions, the 55 million pounds of commercial U.S. salmon are frequently dosed with antibiotics for long periods of time—about 150 pounds of antibiotic per acre of salmon. Stuart Levy comments:

Since they are deposited in the water, [antibiotics] can be picked up easily by other marine animals. Tetracycline is not rapidly degraded in fish. Thus, it is excreted in its active state in feces and deposited on the sea floor. Here, too, it remains relatively stable, out of direct sunlight, which can degrade it. Consequently, the ecological effect of this antibacterial agent in the sea is the same as it is in land animals: the long-term selection of resistant and multi-resistant bacteria in salmon and other marine life.
35

Plant communities and soil are also exposed to direct antibiotic use, not just through effluent flows. To treat infections in mono-cropped fields, especially while attacking fire blight in apple and pear orchards, antibiotics such as streptomycin are sometimes sprayed in heavy doses directly on crops. In the United States, between 40,000 and 50,000 pounds of tetracycline and streptomycin are sprayed on fruit trees every year (1 pound of tetracycline will treat 450 people). This kills not only bacteria on the plants but all susceptible bacteria in the soil itself with cascading effects on soil integrity and health. While spraying allows potent doses of streptomycin to directly enter the ecosystem, other antibiotics, like oxytetracycline, are sometimes injected, much as they are with people, directly into larger plants' trunks and roots. Not surprisingly, resistant pathogenic plant bacteria have been found in soil and plant communities wherever such practices occur. The bacterial transposon developed by leaf blight during resistance acquisition has been found in seven wild bacterial species in the soil. All these bacteria now have resistance to the streptomycin normally produced by the soil fungi in the region. This same dynamic has also been found occurring in the soil under wheat plants. The application or spread of antibiotic effluents in the environment is promoting resistance impacts in natural soil communities among wild bacteria, thus interfering with the normal balance of the soil biota. Agricultural practices such as liming fields and industrial heavy-metal pollution
have been found, as well, to increase the density of resistant pathogens in the soil. Researchers have also started to insert bacterial resistance factors directly into the genetic structure of some plants (e.g., sugar beets), and these resistance factors have also been found to move into ecosystem bacteria.

The immense production of antibacterial substances once found only in minute quantities in the environment—substances produced by soil fungi, bacteria, or plants to protect their territorial integrity—has begun to affect the life cycle of bacteria and thousands of other organisms in the ecosystem and subsequently is affecting the health of the soil and the planet itself.

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