Nexus - 1805 - New Times Magazine-pages

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BURSTING THE BUBBLE OF ANTIBIOTICS BURSTING BUBBLE THE ANTIBIOTICS The mass use of antibiotics, also in conjunction with vaccines, has Jed to large-scale immune system compromise and disease susceptibility as well as to the development of superinfections that are resistant to orthodox treatment. hen penicillin was introduced as a mass medication in the 1950s, it was hailed as a miracle cure for all infections. However, most people are unaware that the miracle of penicillin almost never happened. According to Caldwell (2008), when bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from holiday and noticed the destructive action of Penicillium mould upon his agar-agar plate o Staphylococcus, he subsequently found that he couldn't replicate the experiment. Other bacteriologists across Europe, America and the world ried, for fun, to repeat it. They dropped Penicillium onto plates streaked with Staphylococcus, but nothing happened. In that first "experiment", when Fleming went off on holiday in Augus 928, the agar plate streaked with Staphylococcus had been accidentally lef out of the incubator and Penicillium found its way in through an open window from a laboratory below and contaminated the plate. "It was Ronald Hare, Professor Fleming's assistant and later Professor o Bacteriology at St Thomas's, who made the extraordinary discovery,” noted Caldwell. Hare, checking the London meteorological records for tha ortnight of August 1928, "discovered that there had been a nine-day period of unusually cooler temperatures” which favoured the growth of the Penicillium mould. The optimum temperature for Penicillium growth is 25° Celsius, whereas for Staphylococcus it's 35° Celsius. Long before Professor Fleming and others, it was Ernest Duchesne, a 23- year-old French medical student, who on 17 December 1897 presented and defended his thesis, "Contribution to the study of vital competition in micro-organisms: antagonism between moulds and microbes" (Duckett, 1999). Much of his work was confirmed in 1942 by Chain, Florey and Jennings, who identified patulin—the antibiotic produced by Penicillium glaucum—and its effects against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. Since at least 1500 BC, mushrooms, brewer's yeast and moulds have been used to treat infected wounds. Temperature Variation and Immune Response In my British Medical Journal Rapid Response to Caldwell's entry, | wrote that researchers in the 1960s and 1970s intensively studied the effect of temperature on the growth and dynamics of a variety of micro-organisms such as Escherichia coli, golden staph, Streptococcus, Salmonella and Neisseria (Scheibner, 7 January 2009). Mackowiak (1981) reviewed a number of studies on the relationship between body temperature and resistance to infection, and on the effect of physiologic variations in temperature on both the immune response of higher animals and on pathogenic micro-organisms themselves. Never mind what happens in the Petri dish: it all ultimately boils down to what happens in vivo. Email: viera.scheibner@gmail.com Website: NEXUS ° 41 http://www.vierascheibner.com AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2011 www.nexusmagazine.com