By Beth Skwarecki Posted: November 29, 2012 in the PLoS Public Health Blog
You fill a prescription for antibiotics, and have 14 days worth of pills in your hand. Pop quiz: If you want to be a good citizen and prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance, how many of those pills should you take?
The sticker on the bottle is clear: all of them. In India, where Andrew Read studies infectious disease, resistance is so prevalent that standard malaria treatment includes not just the pills, but a boy who comes to your home each day to check that you’ve taken your dose. And yet, Read believes that aggressive treatment with antibiotics is increasing the spread of resistance, not controlling it. To read the rest, click here
Discover more from The Evolution and Medicine Review
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Beth,
As a doc I know that abx save lives, but like the Israeli defense minister put it, “Our tactical decisions are not in our strategic interest.” We are stuck with them, but we use them too much and too often. I took a hint from Paul Ewald: we can tame bacteria by making it harder for them to get around. Soap and water, condoms, bed nets all help by blocking transmission, but there hasn’t been a way to deal with respiratory problems so that area where the need is greatest needs help. So I looked at Nathan Sharon who died trying to get us to understand that bacterial lectins like and bind to sugar complexes; mannose and UTIs were his focus. And then the Finns (Kontiokari et al) showed that xylitol blocked adherence of nasal pathogens and I found that nasal xylitol eliminated more than 90% of chronic otitis. It also optimizes our own nasal defenses.
By the way, what ever happened to Williams and Nesse’ idea to honor defenses as part of evolutionary medicine? I wrote about in The Boids and the Bees: Guiding Adaptation to Improve our Health, Healthcare, Schools and Society, as well as No More Allergies, Asthma, or Sinus Infections which hones in more on the nasal benefits. Too bad xylitol isn’t a drug; more people would know about it.