Antibiotics Can Ruin Your Health
by John I. Buhmeyer, MS
Antibiotics were once hailed as miracle drugs capable of totally defeating infectious diseases. Used properly, antibiotics have saved many lives and have proven a major weapon in the fight against infectious disease. With time, however, we have come to understand that far from being a miracle drug, antibiotics can actually cause serious harm to your health when not used properly. The abuse of broad spectrum antibiotics in particular has created serious health problems, including the appearance of antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogens (disease-causing bacteria) and an epidemic of Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infections, particularly in hospital and other healthcare settings.
Has your doctor ever prescribed antibiotics for you or your child when you have a cold or the flu? Cold and flu are caused by viruses. Antibiotics, on the other hand, are caused by bacteria. So why would your doctor, who is supposed to know better, prescribe a drug that will have no effect whatsoever on the bug causing your illness while possibly wiping out all the beneficial bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract? Perhaps they feel their patients expect to receive a remedy from the doctor, even though there is no effective remedy against viruses. Or your physician may be prescribing antibiotics as litigation prevention to prove that all possible efforts were made on his or her part. Whatever the reason, the casual writing of antibiotics prescriptions for whatever ails you has become very commonplace in the United States and has led to serious health issues that threaten everyone. Using antibiotics to treat nonbacterial infections or using the wrong antibiotic to fight off a type of bacteria that isn't affected by the prescribed antibiotic are both examples of antibiotic abuse. And the result of antibiotic abuse is resistant strains of pathogens that are even more virulent and even more difficult – or even impossible – to treat.
Has your dentist ever given you antibiotics after oral surgery to prevent infection? The reasoning is that the mouth is a very dirty place full of all sorts of bacteria, including a number of potential pathogens. It makes sense to take antibiotics to prevent infection of a surgical site, doesn't it? Actually, it doesn't. Fighting an active infection and preventing one are actually two very different things. Antibiotics work well for the former but their effectiveness in the latter is very limited and indeed sometimes counterproductive (Pallasch 2003a; Sancho-Puchades 2009). Rather than preventing infection, such prophylactic use of antibiotics can breed resistant strains of pathogens as well as destroying beneficial bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. There are more effective ways of preventing infection in a wound or surgical site than antibiotics.
Whenever you take an antibiotic, there are six possible events that may take place, only one of which is beneficial, namely, when the antibiotic assists the built-in defenses of the body to control and eliminate an infection. Other possible outcomes are not so beneficial. The antibiotic may cause toxicity or allergy, provoke a superinfection with antibiotic-resistant pathogens, stimulate mutations of bacterial chromosomes that result in drug resistance, promote the expression of dormant resistance genes in pathogens, or provoke resistance gene transfer to other bacterial species (Pallasch 2003b).
A hidden danger of antibiotic abuse is the presence of active antibiotics in the effluent of waste water treatment plants. Up to 90% of the antibiotics we take is excreted in an active form (Salleh 2005). These antibiotics then appear in our drinking water and have the potential to deteriorate the ecosystem by killing bacterial populations or provoking resistant strains in the rivers and streams into which the effluent is dumped (Costanzo 2005). One study examined the differences in the levels of antibiotics and illegal drugs (meth- amphetamine and ecstasy) in the affluent and effluent of treatment plants in Western Kentucky. The percentages of antibiotics and drugs removed during treatment varied, but all of the substances studied entered the eco-system after treatment. Less than half (47%) azithromycin in the affluent was removed by treatment, and just over half (54.5%) of the methamphetamine in the water was removed (Loganathan 2009). Azithromycin is one of the best selling antibiotics in the world and is commonly prescribed to treat a wide-range of infections from middle ear infections to pneumonia. The ecological impact of this leakage into the environment is unknown and largely unstudied.
When broad spectrum antibiotics are given to a patient, the result is that it not only kills pathogenic bacteria but also virtually all the normal flora of the gut. This leaves the gut wide open to colonization by dangerous pathogens, par-ticularly C. difficile. C. difficile causes a variety of diseases, known as Clostr-idium difficile-associated diseases (CDAD). CDAD ranges from diarrhea to life-threatening pseudomembranous colitis. C. difficile is generally spread by contact, most often through insufficiently sterilized equipment in hospitals and other health care facilities, such as nursing homes. Recently, however, it was found that C. difficile spores could be found in the air in a nursing home (Roberts 2008). This may be why C. difficile is so hard to control and so persistent in health care facilities.
Both the number and severity of CDAD cases have risen sharply over recent decades suggesting that C. difficile has increased antibiotic resistance as well as increased virulence. The increase in C. difficile infections can be directly traced to the abuse of broad spectrum antibiotics.
The usual response to C. difficile infections is – you guessed it – more antibiotics, in particular vancomycin which has yet to produce resistant strains. Based on previous experience with antibiotics, however, it is only a matter of time until resistant strains appear. More effective treatment strategies focus on antibiotics that spare normal flora (Johnson 2009). A new approach using natural antimicrobial peptides (AMP) that make up part of the innate defense found in both invertebrates and vertebrates may make possible the design of selective AMPs against specific pathogens, such as C. difficile (Nusslein 2006). The use of probiotics (beneficial bacteria) to prevent C. difficile outbreaks is also being investigated (Graul 2009; Imhoff 2009)
There is one natural product already available that is known to control C. difficile infections of the gut, bovine colostrum. Colostrum has been shown to neutralize the toxins produced by C. difficile (Wada 1980; Kim 1984). It also prevents the binding of C. difficile to target cells in the gut (Naaber 1996), thus preventing infection. Immunoglobulins specific against C. difficile have also been found in both colostrum and milk (Le Jan 1978). In fact, colostrum has been used successfully against a wide variety of bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoan pathogens, including rotavirus (a leading cause of diarrhea in infants), Candida albicans (a type of yeast that causes infections such as thrush and gastrointestinal overgrowth in humans), Shigella flexneri (causes shigellosis, a form of dysentery and other diseases), Eschericia coli (some strains can cause food poisoning), Streptococcus mutans (causes strep throat, meningitis, pneumonia, endocarditis and other diseases), Cryptosporidium parvum (a protozoan parasite that causes diarrhea, particular in AIDS patients), and Helicobacter pylori (cause of ulcers in man) (Korhonen 2000). And a new spray product derived from colostrum using Lactopeptides® (lactoferrin and proline-rich polypeptides) is even more potent in its effects against these pathogens.
The next time your doctor offers you a prescription for antibiotics, think about whether you really need them or not.
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