The deaths of an alarming number of children and teenagers from drug resistant staph infections, and the publication this week of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report stating that these infections are evidence that our society's overuse of antibiotics is having deadly consequences.
According to the CDC, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections generally effect people in hospitals and nursing homes with weakened immune systems. However in recent weeks the disease has spread among otherwise healthy people who have had little or no contact with hospitals -- most notably among high school athletes.
The CDC claims that the disease can usually be treated using antibiotics not related to methicillin and pennicilin. But the fact that the diseases is spreading to new populations may suggest that it is mutating. Bacteria develop resistance to new drugs quickly -- and S. aureus has a special talent for developing new resistance. In 1999, Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote:
"Over the past decades, this particular staph species ha learned resistance to one antibiotic after another. (Several researchers believe [and have demonstrated in vitro to prove their point] that S. aureus learned resistance from benign E. coli in the human gut.) Not so long ago, staph was still susceptible to two antibiotics: methicillin and vancomycin. Inevitably, methicillin-resistant staph (MRSA) emerged. Physicians and reseachers were worried but tried to hold the line, to stop any further adaptation by S. aureus. Given the nature of bacteria, they were doomed to failure: on August 2, 1998 The New York Times reported the first four world cases of vancomycin-resistant staph. There are no antibiotics that can successfully treat vancomycin resistant S. aureus. [ . . .]
"[ . . .] Bacteria learn resistance in an inexorable exponential growth curve, and using mathematical modeling researchers had predicted with uncanny accuracy, almost to the month, when vancomycin-resistant staph would appear. It will now proceed into the general population of the world at the same exponential rate."
Exposure to pharmaceutical antibiotics stimulates bacteria to evolve more quickly, cycling through all the possible defenses against the chemical they have been exposed to. Through the same process they often also develop resistance to other, unrelated antibiotics. When they succeed in developing new resistances, they emit special pheremones to attract other bacteria and pass on the new resistance information.
Our bodies are saturated with antibiotics -- even if we don't take them directly. Factory farms routinely administer the drugs to livestock to stimulate growth. Those antibiotics are passed onto us through our food -- and they also enter our environment when they are excreted by humans and animals.
We are doomed to lose the pharaceutical arms race in which we keep bombarding bacteria with new chemicals and they keep responding with new forms of resistance.
But all is not lost:
Bacteria "forget" their resistance over time. So if we were to dramatically reduce antibiotic use across the board, over time diseases like MRSA would decline, and we would be able to continue to use antibiotics in extreme cases where nothing else is effective.
And while bacteria quickly develop resistance to the relatively simple compounds we generally use in medicine, they have a much harder time developing resistance to more complex plant medicines that contain a multitude of synergistic compounds. And since plant medicine is living medicine, plant chemistry evolves over time, often providing new responses to human and animal diseases.
So if we want to defeat MRSA and other virulent new diseases, we need to radically change our approach to medicine.
As ethnobotanist James Duke writes:
"When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful amont them. We lose the synergy when we take out a single compound. But most important we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine. The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plant, may be our best hope in confronting drug-resistant bacteria."
For more on these issues see Buhner's Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives to Treating Drug Resistant Bacteria. (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 1999.)
