Weapons of mass sanitation

Maria Isabel Garcia

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Weapons of mass sanitation
[Science Solitaire] The indiscriminate use of antibiotics – the kind of 'mass cleaning' we do to our insides when we are sick – is harmful not just to you but to everyone

If we could see microbes with our naked eyes, we would be paralyzed to do anything. That is because they are everywhere and they are a lot. In your stomach alone, you have 100 trillion bacteria alone and like people, they all have different sorts of careers when it comes to what they can do to your health. That means not all of them could be destructive to your health. Many of them are in fact vital to your bodily and mental health. But with all the common, widespread and easy cleaning solutions that modern life has produced – including antibiotics,, have we released a weapon of mass destruction among all bacteria, thus eliminating even the ones that are essential to our good health?

If by hygiene we mean the absence of all microbes, then yes, that kind of weapon of mass, indiscriminate cleaning, may be putting our immune systems at risk.

Indeed, asthma and allergies have been on the rise in the past decades and scientists have been investigating what is going on. Of course, the obvious cause would be the things in the modern environment like pollution. But why isn’t everyone afflicted with it? And what about allergies to food that are already there in childhood? What makes other people resistant to these increasingly common conditions? Scientists think immunity to certain conditions are built by the presence of certain kinds of “friendly” microbes that fight off diseases.

Studies have found that infants who have been given antibiotics have higher chances of food allergies. This is because antibiotics have eliminated, along with the disease-causing kind, the kind of microbes that help you ingest certain kinds of food. This is most likely why children who have been sick in childhood were not given antibiotics but survived, develop a stronger immunity later in life. It is true that you get stronger when you get sick and survive it. You develop an immunity to diseases until the next round comes along to test you and your microbes.  

This is the reason why the indiscriminate use of antibiotics – the kind of “mass cleaning” we do to our insides when we are sick – is harmful not just to you but to everyone. When we take antibiotics, those bacteria that are not killed by those drugs grow even stronger – far ahead than drug companies can formulate new antibiotics that could kill them. And that is clearly bad news for all of us.

Studies also linking microbiome to mental conditions are also coming to the surface, revealing that how we behave is also linked to the bacteria we have. Thus we have the term “psychobiotics” to describe the treatments that could boost the kind of bacteria that could help with mental conditions like anxiety, mood disorders and even depression. They did experiments with different kinds of bacteria with mice and you would be surprised at how the personalities of those mice changed depending on the kind of bacteria or their presence or absence in the mice. You get mice that is more stressed, more shy, more anxious, more daring, depending on the bacteria treatment they got.

My Dad has been living with liver cancer for over 7 years and he thinks he has been winning over cancer that long because he grew up with very poor hygiene. He says being poor early in life may have really turned out to be his best health defense. I have no way of knowing that for sure. But if I look at how recent successful cancer treatments have been if doctors pump up the immune system of the body so it could fight cancer, then my Dad’s idea about his own fight makes a lot of sense. The only hitch with my Dad is we don’t really know what kind of bacteria did he invite in his microbiome that built up the kind of immune system we have. The environment he grew up in has long been leveled out as part of the uniform urban sprawl.

And scientists like Kathleen Barnes, in an interview in a Scientific American podcast, says that testing different kinds of environment and the biome they harbor is essential to knowing what kind of microbes do what to our immunity. Thus it is important that we do not make all our living environments the same. Biodiversity, as it turns out, is not just good for the planet in terms of ecological health or even culture (since the variety of languages is linked to biodiversity), it is also good for our immune system. Diversity is key to how our minds, bodies and cultures can flourish.  

But she also pointed to the folly of romanticizing the days of old – when there was no clean running water – as the days when we were stronger. Many died from infections caused by the lack of clean water, sewage system or refrigeration.  But as always, there is still a price to pay for modern life, and among them, a new set of diseases that are not “mass killers” but require a different set of testing and homing in, to treat or cure.

The general advice seems to be for us to generally go outdoors into the natural environment more so we could have a more varied, more skilled labor force of bacteria inside us to build our immune system. But still, always to wash our hands thoroughly with soap, change our sheets and towels regularly, shower, change clothing daily, clean our chopping boards immediately after use, especially if we used it to cut meat. Those will protect us against those sure nasty bacteria and invite the friendly ones on board our bodies they can now also call their home. – Rappler.com

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