This book’s task is to point to solutions to the crisis which is already here. Your task is to try to do something about this crisis in your own life – by learning more, trying harder to accept responsibility for enhancing your own health, and doing your best to ensure that the truth about antibiotics spreads.
People demand antibiotics, and doctors commonly comply, often knowing that taking them is worse than useless in a given situation. People who understand these dangers will help doctors to reserve the use of antibiotics to those times when they are indeed life-savers.
We have seen something of the crisis in which we find ourselves as a result of misguided use of the potentially life-saving antibiotic drugs –
And as a result of all of these misuses of antibiotics we are witnessing the looming crisis of bacterial infections which will be untreatable.
This monster – the totally antibiotic-resistant bacteria which are being unleashed on the human and animal kingdom – will require strategies other than more and more powerful antibiotics. These strategies form much of the remainder of this book, after examining what antibiotics actually do in Chapters 3 and 4.
In this chapter we will get to know some of the cast of characters involved in this saga – those that live in and on us, at best enormously beneficial and at worst potentially disease-causing, as well as a number of the bacteria which cause disease, sometimes mild but often with the potential, in the right circumstances (right for them, wrong for us) to cause life-threatening illness.
The (Usually) Friendly Bacteria
There are actually hundreds of different bacterial organisms and many more different strains living inside us, many doing useful jobs, as we will see. However, there are only a few which are present in really large numbers, and it is these which we will now examine briefly. For further details of their functions, what can harm them and what we can do to encourage their (and therefore our) health, see Chapters 9 and 10.
There is evidence that under the appropriate conditions, some of the friendly bacteria can become dangerous to us. One such situation can occur when there has been excessive use of antibiotics. This will be described more fully in Chapter 4.
Some of the ‘normal resident’ bacteria described below (S. faecal is, for example) have a borderline status – normally they do no harm, but they have been implicated in infection – of the bladder, for example – in some cases.
We have to remember that there is a delicate symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship between us and the organisms that have lived inside us for millions of years, but in the end they are looking after their own best interests and not ours; we benefit from them when all the environmental conditions are as they ought to be. One of the factors which can seriously disrupt the environment in which these bacteria live is the use of antibiotics, which while killing ‘bad’ bacteria do harm to the ‘good’ ones as well (not all antibiotics do this to the same degree, as will be seen in Chapter 4).
BIFIDOBACTERIUM BIFIDUM
These friendly bacteria inhabit the intestines – with a greater presence in the large intestine (the colon) than the small intestine. They also live in the vagina. In breastfed babies together with B, infantis and B. longum they form 99 percent of the flora of the intestines, but gradually reduce in numbers as we age. Their major roles are:
LACTOBACILLUS ACIDOPHILUS
This natural inhabitant of the intestines also lives in the mouth and vagina. Its main site of occupation is the small intestine. Its major roles are:
BIFIDOBACTERIUM LONGUM
This is a natural inhabitant of the human intestines and vagina. It is found in larger numbers in the large intestine than the small intestine. Together with other bifidobacteria, this is the dominant organism of breastfed infants (making up 99 percent of the microflora). In adolescence and adult life the bifidobacteria are still the dominant organism of the large intestine (when health is good). Among its main benefits are: