According to USA Today, August 22^nd, 1997, health officials warned that a new, deadly microbe has shown up in a Michigan man. The bacterium, vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is so named because the antibiotic, vancomycin, is usually regarded as the drug of last resort when dealing with staphylococcus infections. This new strain has developed what health officials call a "moderate resistance" to vancomycin, meaning it is nearly immune to the antibiotic.

The appearance of this strain renews scientists’ and doctors’ fears that over-use of antibiotics has led to a current situation where medical science is helpless to fight these new drug-resistant strains of common infectious bacteria.

S. aureus is so common that one-third of all people carry the bacterium on their skin. Before the advent of antibiotics, the microbe caused widespread outbreaks in which up to 60% of the victims died.

Another extremely common bacterium, E. coli, is flexing new muscles that are worrying many scientists and doctors – and killing people all over the world. A new strain of this most common microbe is E. coli O157:H7, which only recently caused a nationwide food-poisoning epidemic, leading to the shutdown of one of the nation’s biggest meat-processing plants and the recall of 25 million pounds of ground hamburger that came from the plant.

E. coli is everywhere – it is in the intestines of every mammal. Usually it is benign – in fact, it is generally believed to help us digest and eliminate our food. E. coli O157:H7, on the other hand, is a highly toxic, deadly, mutation of the same bacterium which has been identified only since the early 1980’s. It is on the rise worldwide and is very hard to detect.

Vegetarians aren’t safe either – it’s not just meat that carries this killer E. coli. Last year, Japan had just one outbreak, thought to be the worst in its history, in which over 10,000 people got sick and 12 people died. Health officials there believe (although they can’t be certain) that the bug was spread by people eating radish sprouts which were raised hydroponically. As far as they can tell, the bacterium was in the water in which the sprouts were grown. This is scary in itself because, if the organism can survive in water, it can spread even more quickly than when it is in food. Once this E. coli is in your system, there is no antibiotic that will work against it. The only way to safeguard against it is to cook all food to a temperature of 160°F – the temperature at which the microbe will die. Of course, this won’t work in cases like the radish-sprout outbreak, because foods like this are usually eaten raw. Not only this new strain of E. coli causes food poisoning. The problem is widespread in our society. Most doctors agree there is no such thing as "gastric flu", and that most cases of that so-called ailment are, in fact, food poisoning. According to different estimates by The Center For Food Safety and the Center for Disease Control, from 30 to 80 percent of chickens are seriously contaminated with salmonella.

ABC TV News ran a report on August 18, 1997, during its evening news that quoted a "government source" as saying that as many as 33 million people in the US suffer from food poisoning and that over 1,000 die each year! It’s not just these new killer bacteria that are causing concern in the medical and scientific communities. Many experts warn that new strains of even common viruses like influenza could cause huge epidemics or even pandemics like the flu pandemic of 1918 (a pandemic is a worldwide epidemic).

While other virulent, more recently discovered viruses, like Ebola, are getting a lot of attention, many medical researchers believe that a flu pandemic could pose a much greater threat than these more exotic viruses – or even HIV.

Recent research shows also that bacteria could play a major role in heart disease, our number one killer in the Western Hemisphere. As reported in a The Salt Lake City Tribune on June 1, 1996, a study conducted at The University of Utah School of Medicine showed strong evidence that the bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae is a major contributing factor to atherosclerosis, the clogging of the arteries that is one of the major causes of heart disease. Researchers there believe that this bacterium may be responsible for as much as 50% of all serious heart disease.

What are we to do in the face of this growing onslaught of disease-causing agents? Most doctors are beginning to realize that pharmaceutical antibiotics, even the most sophisticated ones, are not much help and may even be aggravating the problem by triggering mutations among bacteria to create resistance to the antibiotics.

Thankfully, colostrum helps with this growing problem in three important ways. First, research studies have shown bovine colostrum has the ability to protect from infection and provide passive immunity to E. coli and rotavirus (the leading intestinal killers) Second, its immune factors (immunoglobulins, etc.) greatly strengthen our body’s natural defenses to virtually all disease- causing bacteria and viruses. Third, colostrum contains lactoferrin, which has been shown in numerous research studies to be a potent, broad-spectrum natural antibiotic and anti-viral agent (pharmaceutical antibiotics have no effectiveness against viruses). In fact, in a recent study in The Netherlands, lactoferrin proved a powerful inhibitor of the HIV-1 virus, the main virus which causes AIDS.