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Thorsons
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First published by Thorsons as
Antibiotic Crisis, Antibiotic Alternatives 1998
© Leon Chaitow 1998
Leon Chaitow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 9780007122479
Ebook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780008212896
Version: 2016-08-24
1: The Antibiotic Crisis
Crisis, What Crisis?
Health care in the industrialized world has never been more available, or so we are told.
More and better hospitals are built (are there more sick people?).
Ever more complex and high-tech treatments are devised.
Life-expectancy rates are rising (quantity, perhaps, but what of quality?).
Research continues at breakneck pace into all aspects of disease causation and treatment.
New, highly trained doctors and nurses are turned out every year.
… And yet there really is a crisis, as we will see.
Old diseases such as TB which were thought to be history are back, and are often untreatable because the bacterial agents which cause the infections have become resistant to antibiotics which previously controlled them easily.
This acquired resistance presents an enormous threat to the health of us all, not just those who are malnourished and impoverished.
Whether or not more and more hospitals and high-tech diagnostic and treatment methods equate with better health for the general public is itself open to question. However, what is not debatable is the fact that one of the most potent tools in the medical tool-box, antibiotics, are no longer working on many extremely dangerous bacteria, or only work when used in amounts so high that they are likely to cause serious side-effects.
The evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria – superbugs – therefore forms a significant part of the story we need to examine in order to understand the crisis.
The UK Office of Health Economics reported in September 1997>1 that –
5,000 people are being killed every year in British hospitals by infections they catch – when they are in the hospital.
A further 15,000 people’s deaths are being contributed to infections they catch – when they are in the hospital.
One in every 16 patients who goes into the hospital for anything at all will develop a ‘hospital acquired infection’ (HAI) – a serious illness which they catch from someone in the hospital, usually a member of staff.
In intensive care units the rate is as high as one patient in every five developing an HAI.
The most common of the infections acquired in this way relate to the bladder, chest and surgical wounds – and many of them involve difficult to treat ‘superbugs’ (see below).
In the US, figures published in 1994 show that one patient out of every 10 develops infections caught in the hospital, and that this involves around 2.5 million people every year.
Every year 20,000 of these people die from – and the deaths of a further 60,000 are contributed to by – the hospital acquired infections, a huge number of them involving antibiotic resistant superbugs.
>2Internal Ecological Damage
There is, however, another major outcome from the use of antibiotics which forms a less obvious but nevertheless very important part of the crisis story; the devastation that occurs in the internal environment of the body, its own ecology, especially that of the intestinal tract where hundreds of trillions of ‘friendly’ bacteria live and provide life-supporting services for us.