Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (7 page)

We have, as Mark Lappé remarked in
The End of Antibiotics
, “let our profligate use of antibiotics reshape the evolution of the microbial world and wrest any hope of safe management from us.”

Bacteria are not our enemies, as some scientists have postulated, nor a dangerous life-form bent on sickening mankind, as so many television commercials would have us believe. They are our ancestors and we are very much alike; we both metabolize fats, vitamins, sugars, and proteins. Lynn Margulis comments succinctly, “The more balanced view of microbe as colleague and ancestor remains almost unexpressed. Our culture ignores the hard-won fact that these disease ‘agents,' these ‘germs,' also germinated all life. Our ancestors, the germs, were bacteria.”
³⁶
Bacteria are not germs but the germinators—and fabric—of all life on Earth. In declaring war on them, we declared war on the underlying living structure of the planet, on all life-forms we can see, on ourselves.

One of the few naturally sterile places on Earth is a woman's womb, and the gestation period prior to birth is the only time any human body is bacteria free. At birth, assuming it is a healthy one, the baby is immediately placed on the mother's chest near the nipple. As the first movements toward bonding are taking place, the bacteria that live on
the mother's skin began to colonize her baby's body. When the infant begins to nurse, the interior of the baby's intestinal tract is colonized—from the skin around the nipple and the milk itself—and these bacteria are crucially important. Nursing introduces lactobacilli and other bacteria such as
Bifidobacterium bifidus
into the intestinal tract of newborns. This has significant effects on their health.
Lactobacillus acidophilus
bacteria create important vitamins and nutrients such as B
₁
, B
₂
, B
₃
, B
₁₂
, and folic acid in the intestinal tract. They help digest food and they also secrete natural antibiotic substances such as acidophilin, various organic acids, and peroxides that help prevent bacterial infections.

One to two pounds of our adult body weight comes from our coevolutionary bacteria. The bacteria that colonize us as infants have an ancient, coevolutionary relationship with human beings; they are an integral part of our species' development and our body ecology. They are in fact our first line of defense against disease.

The skin of our bodies and the mucosal systems of our sinus passages and intestinal tracts are to bacteria much like fresh fertile black soil is to plants. Plow up the soil, disturbing the plants that grow there, and even if you don't plant anything, the soil will soon be covered with a profusion of new plant growth. The same thing occurs in our bodies if our bacterial ecology is disturbed, as it often is, by antibiotics.

The bacteria that colonize our bodies are friendly, mutualistic bacteria. They take up all the space on and in our bodies on which bacteria can grow. By so doing, they leave no room for other, less benign bacteria to live. But the relationship goes beyond this.
All
of our coevolutionary bacteria generate antibiotic substances that kill off other, less friendly bacteria. The
Streptococcus
bacteria that normally live in our throats produce large quantities of antibacterial substances that are
specifically active against the
Streptococcus pyogenes
bacteria that cause strep throat.

Regular exposure to pathogenic bacteria as we are growing teaches our bodies and our symbiotic bacteria how to respond most effectively to disease organisms. This produces much higher levels of health in later life. Research continually finds that children who are “protected” from bacteria by keeping them in exceptionally clean environments where they are constantly exposed to antibacterial soaps and wipes are not in fact healthier but much sicker overall than children not so protected. The constant exposure to a world filled with bacteria, the world out of which we emerged as a species, in fact stimulates the immune health of all of us as we grow. We actually
need
to come into contact with the microorganisms of the world to be healthy.

The truth is, we live in an ancient, healthy symbiosis with bacterial, viral, and microfaunal colonizers. Our bodies are much like the soil of the earth, covered inside and out with a broad diversity of microfauna providing an interdependent complex of support services. When we become ill, our symbiotic relationship with the healthy bacteria and other microfauna—our body ecology—is disturbed. The underlying factor that disrupts the body ecology is the illness, not the pathogenic bacteria that take advantage of it to occupy body sites. Antibiotics do not cure disease, they simply kill off opportunistic bacteria. Without the body's ability to restore a healthy ecology, people die anyway. More than any other disease, AIDS has taught us the limitations of antibiotics and the bacterial model of disease. Irrespective of the quantities of antibiotics used, when AIDS patients' bodies can no longer reestablish their internal ecology they die. As Marc Lappé says, “It is the
body
which ultimately controls infections, not chemicals. Without underlying immunity, drugs are meaningless.”
³⁷
Ironically, as many public health historians now know, the major decreases in human mortality and disease proclaimed to be brought about by antibiotics were due more, in fact, to better public hygiene.

Because they kill off so much of the internal symbiotic microfauna along with pathogenic bacteria, antibiotics create significant changes
in human microfaunal ecology and makeup. The appearance of many diseases new to humankind such as certain nutrient deficiencies, candida overgrowth, certain chronic infections, allergies, and chronic immune suppression are now being directly linked to the distorted internal landscape antibiotics cause. Marc Lappé comments:

Lincomycin eliminates virtually all of the bacteria that require oxygen, while neomycin and kanamycin decrease the number of oxygen-requiring germs and gram-positive anaerobic ones, leading to overgrowth of
Candida albicans
and
Staphylococcus aureus
. Polymyxin can reduce native
E. coli
to the point of extinction, leaving the terrain open for staph and strep organisms. Erythromycin has a similar favorable effect on streptococci, while bacitracin and damycin, by contrast, appear to favor the growth of
Clostridium difficile
.
³⁸

And it is not just humans that have coevolutionary bacterial partners but all plant, insect, and animal life. When these other life-forms encounter antibiotics, their interior and exterior ecologies are disturbed as well.

If bacteria had not learned how to develop resistance, all life on Earth, including humans, would already have died. When we try to kill all disease organisms on this planet, ultimately, we are acting to kill ourselves.

The situation is dire and there are solutions, but they are not easy ones. As David Livermore has said, “A lot of modern medicine would become impossible if we lost our ability to treat infections.”
³⁹
Routine surgeries would no longer be routine but nearly impossible to perform safely. Infectious diseases would regularly become epidemic, sweeping through whole communities. The use of quarantine, rare now, would become common. Mortality among the old and the very young would rise tremendously. An entire world view, commonly accepted by most people in Western countries, would begin to crumble. It would be (medically speaking), for all practical purposes, 1928 again.

In the first edition of this book, I, as many others have done, urged people to give up using antibiotics unless there were a serious threat of death or disability if they did not. (I also thought real estate in Nevada might be a good investment.) More than a decade later, it is clear that
antibiotics are not going to be used any less and in fact are being used at far greater rates than they were 15 years ago. The human species, as a group, has never really been known for doing the sensible thing before it is too late. We will stop using antibiotics only when they truly fail to work. And even then most of the people in the Western world will still try to hold on to them and our fatally flawed approach to bacterial disease.

But for those who clearly understand what the word “exponential” means, who want to truly empower themselves and their families and prepare for the time that is so quickly approaching us, there are options.

You can take control over your own health and health care. You can prepare. You can learn to use herbal medicines to heal yourself from disease. And you can learn what to do if you find that one day you need to know how to treat a resistant infection.

The rest of this book is designed to help you do just that.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

—
Albert Einstein

Included among the Gram-positive pathogens are methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
and
S. epidermidis,
vancomycin-resistant
Enterococcus faecium
and
E. faecialis,
and the rapidly growing mycobacteria. In the past five years, however, no fewer than four novel agents have been approved that have clinical activity versus these bacteria. It is really among the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria that we find growing unmet medical need, and only a single new agent has been approved in well over a decade.

—
Steven Projan,
Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobials

Many people believe
that there will always be antibiotics and that if the ones we have now aren't working, others will be discovered that will work just as well, so no need to worry. The truth, unfortunately, is very different. There are virtually no new antibiotics in development, and there are unlikely to be. Pharmaceutical companies have almost completely given up the search for them. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being, of course, financial.

In spite of cultural beliefs to the contrary, physicians can cure relatively few of the conditions that plague us. For high cholesterol they prescribe anticholesterol drugs, for arthritis anti-inflammatories, and so on. These drugs artificially alter the condition of the body, but they do not cure the underlying condition. In consequence, the drugs are often taken for decades; they are a never-ending source of money for the companies that make them. (And the profit of the top 12 pharmaceutical companies in the world in 2009? 100
billion
dollars.)

Antibiotics, on the other hand, are too successful. They are used for a short period of time, the disease is eradicated, the patient cured. They are a victim of their own success. Brad Spellberg, author of
Rising Plague
, notes: “For many years now, leading members of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) have been aware that antibiotics were no longer being developed by many pharmaceutical companies. Indeed, many pharmaceutical companies have actually completely eliminated their research and development programs for antibiotic drug discovery.”
¹
Stuart Levy, perhaps the foremost researcher on resistant organisms in the United States, comments that “the problem is the pharmaceutical industry has left the discovery field and so new antibiotics are not coming along.”
²
He says, rather matter-of-factly, that it is just more profitable for the drug companies to develop medications for long-term conditions such as heart disease and arthritis than it is to find new antibiotics.

Research by Spellberg's group found that between 1983 and 2008, investment in antibiotic research and development in the United States fell by 75 percent. His team found only five to seven new antibiotics in the pipeline, most expected to reach the market by 2012, and all of them just slightly altered versions of existing antibiotics.

And no, biotechnology companies are not doing any better. In 2004 all biotech companies combined had only one antibiotic in any kind of development stage. Worse,
every
one of the antibiotics expected to
reach market by 2012 are for Gram-positive bacteria. There are
none
in any stage of development that can treat Gram-negative organisms, the fastest growing category of resistant pathogens. After 2012? That's it. There are none in any stage of development and no plans for any, a fact that shocks most people. They just don't believe that the drug companies would be so complacent—or that they would care so little. I mean, they are in the business of helping people … aren't they?

There is a very old story—it's about greed actually, and just a little bit about mathematics—of a king and the man who saved his life. The king was very grateful and told the man he would reward him with anything he wished. The man told the king that the only thing he wanted was some rice. He then asked the king if he played chess. The king replied that yes, he did. So the man said he would like to use the chess board to determine the amount of rice with which he would be rewarded. He wanted the king to put one grain of rice on the first square, then two on the second, four on the next, and so on. The king said sure, that sounds like a good idea, and he told his councilors to arrange it. They came back a bit later and very hesitantly told the king that they couldn't do it. The king was pretty upset and asked why and was told that by the last square the man would receive more rice than existed in the entire kingdom. (I'm not sure, but I think the king beheaded the man who made the request—nobody likes a smart-ass.)