Your cart
Your cart is empty.HEALTH NEWS
E. Coli Learns Resistance from Small Doses of Antibiotics
June 25, 2011
The contamination of the water supply and food supply with small amounts of antibiotics is continually ignored by health authorities as not important. A new study changes that fundamental safety assumption. It shows that E. coli rapidly gain resistance to antibiotics1 when exposed to low doses that are not adequate to kill them. This study indicates that currently used practices for raising food animals and treating humans are at the root of breeding superstrains of E. coli, as recently highlighted in the German outbreak.
When humans are indiscriminately given antibiotics, which has been going on for decades, not only does it breed E. coli resistance within them but antibiotic residues in urine end up entering the water supply. When the fast food animal industry gives antibiotics as a preventive against disease in their sickly and unhealthy flocks and herds, they are not only breeding E. coli resistance in the animals but residues of antibiotics are in the meats we eat and milk we drink. Public health officials have never considered these low-level exposures to be any risk at all.
We have long known that E. coli are the master gene swappers of bacteria, even helping other types of bacteria become antibiotic resistant by giving them their antibiotic resistant genes. This new study shows that exposing E. coli to small doses of antibiotics is like sending them to school. The small doses are not enough to kill them; they are enough to train them to become resistant to a larger dose of antibiotics that is intended to kill them.
At one time in our history, antibiotics were a wonder drug. They were a quick fix that the AMA used as part of a propaganda campaign to help wipe out alternative medicine as it was then known (the Eclectic physicians). That quick fix has run its course, its credit line is far overdrawn, and the dangers unleashed are far worse than the original dangers it helped combat. Over the past decade, alternative medicine has risen from the dead. Will a critical mass of Americans catch on to the principles of natural health in time? Please do your part to help spread the word.
When humans are indiscriminately given antibiotics, which has been going on for decades, not only does it breed E. coli resistance within them but antibiotic residues in urine end up entering the water supply. When the fast food animal industry gives antibiotics as a preventive against disease in their sickly and unhealthy flocks and herds, they are not only breeding E. coli resistance in the animals but residues of antibiotics are in the meats we eat and milk we drink. Public health officials have never considered these low-level exposures to be any risk at all.
We have long known that E. coli are the master gene swappers of bacteria, even helping other types of bacteria become antibiotic resistant by giving them their antibiotic resistant genes. This new study shows that exposing E. coli to small doses of antibiotics is like sending them to school. The small doses are not enough to kill them; they are enough to train them to become resistant to a larger dose of antibiotics that is intended to kill them.
At one time in our history, antibiotics were a wonder drug. They were a quick fix that the AMA used as part of a propaganda campaign to help wipe out alternative medicine as it was then known (the Eclectic physicians). That quick fix has run its course, its credit line is far overdrawn, and the dangers unleashed are far worse than the original dangers it helped combat. Over the past decade, alternative medicine has risen from the dead. Will a critical mass of Americans catch on to the principles of natural health in time? Please do your part to help spread the word.
Share this content
