Doctors Warn Mankind Is Entering The Post-Antibiotic Era

image: The Lancet

Chris Carrington
Activist Post

A team of experts has warned that mankind is entering the post-antibiotic era. A special report in the Lancet Medical journal brings together 26 experts in the field who ALL concur that the antibiotics currently being prescribed are at the end of their useful lives.

The medical profession has known for years that we would reach this point, and they have been warning about it for a considerable time. Even though they have been very vocal and very public about their concerns, drug companies have not yet even come close to developing new products that could prevent us returning to pre-antibiotic times when even the simplest of infections killed on a daily basis.

Commenting in The Independent, Professor John Watson said:

I am concerned that in 20 years, if I go into hospital for a hip replacement, I could get an infection leading to major complications and possible death, simply because antibiotics no longer work as they do now.

In the Lancet report, Dame Sally Davies writes that the death rates from bacterial infections:

….might return to those of the early 20th century. Rarely has modern medicine faced such a grave threat. Without antibiotics, treatments from minor surgery to major transplants could become impossible, and health-care costs are likely to spiral as we resort to newer, more expensive antibiotics and sustain longer hospital admissions.

It would be easy to lay the blame for the issue at the feet of doctors who over-prescribe and their patients who demand a pill for every illness, but it’s not that simple.

Antibiotics are used extensively in agriculture, farming and fisheries and all of this exposes humans to antibiotics when they are not sick. It also exposes bacteria to antibiotics on a daily basis giving them the chance to build up resistance. These practices have been proven to contribute to antibiotic resistance, and to a level not previously though of. Completely well individuals are exposed to antibiotics if not on a daily, then on a weekly basis. No research I can find can tell me what effect this can have on humans over the course of their lifetimes.

It’s time we looked beyond conventional medicine for answers.

An article about cinnamon published by the Applied and Environmental Microbiology department of the US National Library of Medicine said in 1978:

The compound inhibits the growth and toxin production of mycotoxin-producing fungi. The substance completely inhibited the growth of Aspergillus parasiticus and A. flavus at 100 microgram/ml and A. ochraceus and A. versicolor at 200 microgram/ml. It inhibited the production of aflatoxin B1 by over 90% at 6.25 microgram/ml, ochratoxin A at 25 microgram/ml, and sterigmatocystin at 50 microgram/ml. The substance also displayed a strong inhibitory effect on the growth of five dermatophytoses species, e.g., Microsporum canis (minimum inhibitory concentration, 3.12 to 6.25 microgram/ml). However, no antibacterial effect was observed at concentrations as high as 50 microgram/ml.

A highbrow way of saying that a substance in cinnamon kills a wide variety of micro-organisms.

Another study, this one in 1999, stated:

Lead researcher Erdogan Ceylan, M.S., reported that in apple juice samples inoculated with about one million E. coli O157:H7 bacteria, about one teaspoon (0.3 percent) of cinnamon killed 99.5 percent of the bacteria in three days at room temperature (25 C). When the same amount of cinnamon was combined with either 0.1 percent sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate, preservatives approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the E. coli were knocked out to an undetectable level. The number of bacteria added to the test samples was 100 times the number typically found in contaminated food. 

Escherichia Coli 0157 is a major problem causing outbreaks of food poisoning that is very hard to treat with conventional antibiotics, yet recent outbreaks have seen dozens dying with no mention of cinnamon being effective against it. The research article is actually entitled “Cinnamon is lethal to E.Coli 0157 H7″.

In 2004, research suggested that cinnamon could be used in the treatment of diabetes as it has the ability to lower blood glucose levels.

Again in 2004 cinnamon oil was shown to kill mosquitoes.

In 2009 cinnamon was shown to be effective against MRSA.

In 2011 cinnamon and garlic were sited as effective antibiotics in chickens.

Natural health practitioners have been saying for years that cinnamon has a wide variety of benefits yet still the average household uses it for nothing more than sprinkling on apples.

Anecdotal evidence going back generations suggest that gargling with a cinnamon mouthwash can alleviate the pain of mouth ulcers and clear throat infections.

Millions of people drink cinnamon and honey tea regularly as part of their general health routine.

Can all these people and all these studies be wrong? (source)

In a recent article, Lizzie Bennett advocated the use of probiotics rather than antibiotics as a treatment for Clostridium difficile, a condition that causes death in a good proportion of its victims.

In August I highlighted a hitherto undiscovered compound with antibiotic properties found in ocean floor mud.

A team led by William Fenical at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has discovered a new chemical compound from an ocean microbe in a preliminary research finding that could one day set the stage for new treatments for anthrax and other ailments such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus(MRSA). 

As reported in the international edition of the German journal Angewandte Chemie, Scripps researcher Chris Kauffman in Fenical’s group first collected the microorganism that produces the compound in 2012 from sediments close to shore off Santa Barbara, Calif. Fenical’s team in the Scripps Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, working in conjunction with San Diego-based Trius Therapeutics, used an analytical technique known as spectroscopy to decipher the unusual structure of a molecule from a microscopic species known as Streptomyces. Initial testing of the compound, which they named anthracimycin, revealed its potency as a killer of anthrax, the infectious disease often feared as a biological weapon, as well as MRSA. 

“The real importance of this work is the fact that anthracimycin has a new and unique chemical structure,” said Fenical, who added that the finding is a basic research discovery, which could lead to testing and development, and eventually a drug. “The discovery of truly new antibiotic compounds is quite rare. This discovery adds to many previous discoveries that show that marine bacteria are genetically and chemically unique.” 

The discovery provides the latest evidence that the oceans, and many of its unexplored regions, represent a vast resource for new materials that could one day treat a variety of diseases and illnesses. Fenical, a distinguished professor of oceanography and pharmaceutical science, helped found the field of marine biomedicine as a researcher at Scripps. He is a pioneer in discovering and identifying these novel compounds. His research has helped bring attention to the need for continued exploration of the ocean for science and society. 

In addition to Fenical and Kauffman, coauthors of the paper include Kyoung Jang, Sang-Jip Nam, Deanna Beatty, and Lauren Paul of Scripps and Jeff Locke of Trius Therapeutics.

The National Institutes of Health and the Transformational Medical Technologies program of the Department of Defense Chemical and Biological Defense Program through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency supported the research.

Unless we want to be back to square one, the days when simple infections couldn’t be treated and turned into life-threatening infections, more has to be done to find answers that the natural world has to offer.

We need to explore medicinal herbs and plants that have been used for generations. We need to look to colloidal silver and to cinnamon in the hope that we can protect our families in the years to come.

Even if science does provide new antibiotics, they will be broadcast wholesale into our food and the problem will recur in the future. Those with the power to do so need to take a good look at what we are consuming, which substances are in the food that we eat. They need to be questioning if those substances need to be there at the levels they are, or even there at all.

Chris Carrington is a writer, researcher and lecturer with a background in science, technology and environmental studies. Chris is an editor for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Wake the flock up!