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The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth

By Stephen Harrod Buhner

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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The End of Antibiotics

These days, the world is "awash with antibiotics," as Buhner states. The U.S. produced 55 million pounds of them in 1999 alone. The combined use of antibiotics in hospitals and clinics, as well as feedlots, creates tremendous environmental waste. They continue to fulfill their mission to kill bacteria no matter where they are found. This has prompted the bacteria in soils, humans, animals, water, and elsewhere to mutate in an effort to survive, which may lead to the worst epidemic ever seen on the planet. In the 1970s, antibiotics were touted as the savior of humanity, able to ward off infectious disease more effectively than anything before. These drugs were seen as certain proof that science could make life better. But, the fact is that infectious diseases kill more people now than previously, generally because bacteria are mutating so quickly that antibiotics are useless against them. Marc Lappe, in his book When Antibiotics Fail, states that, "we have succeeded in upsetting the balance of nature." How has this happened? Bacteria are capable of a variety of responses to attack and able to develop these in a short amount of time; a new generation of bacteria is created every 20 minutes or so. Some of these defense responses include:

moving the attacking substance out of the cells as soon as it enters
changing the permeability of membranes so it can't enter
changing cell metabolism so it can't be processed.

Once a bacterium figures out a good way to counteract an intruder, it shares the information with other bacteria through plasmids. Some bacteria combine resistance ideas from different sources to develop a new defense method. Bacteria are even able to leave information in an environment to be picked up later by other bacteria. Actually, antibiotics have helped both scientists and bacteria, just not the patients. Scientists have learned more about the workings of bacteria since the development of antibiotics. Bacteria have increased their rate of learning by the presence of antibiotics too. In fact, bacteria actually congregate where antibiotics are most present, which may account for the high rates of infection in hospitals, inner cities, and animal feedlots, for example. Stuart Levy did a study to find out how long it would take the bacteria of 300 chickens to develop antiobiotic resistance, and then spread it to other chickens and to the farm families at the chicken farm and nearby. He used six cages of 50 chickens each, half of which were given food with oxytetracycline in it.

The chickens fed with antibiotic-laced food developed resistant bacteria within a day and a half.
The undosed chickens developed resistant bacteria shortly after the others.
Within three months, all of them had developed resistance to other forms of antibiotics that were not even present.
After five months, the neighboring farm family had developed resistance to tetracycline, even though they had no contact with the chickens. Within six months, the neighbors had also developed resistance to five other antibiotics.

This bacteria spread does not just apply to animals and humans, but also to all other life-forms. Antibiotics have aided this as they are fed to commercially raised animals and fish as well as sprayed on commercial crops. This has infected the oceans, lakes, and soils. Unfortunately, then it starts to affect the genetic structure of these life-forms. The large amount of money spent on medicines has not brought U.S. citizens healthy lives. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. is:

24th in the world for healthy life span
8th for women's life expectancy, 15th for men's
20th in the world for infant mortality rate

" Some areas of the United States are as bad off as impoverished African nations," commented Christopher Murray of the World Health Organization. Along with these alarming statistics are the doubts being raised about pharmaceutical companies and their products.

Properly prescribed drugs were the 4th leading cause of death around the year 2000.
More than two million people have been permanently disabled by drug side effects that were not expected.
The use of antibiotics is now known to be the cause of many allergies, Candida overgrowth, nutrient deficiencies, immune system disturbances, and other health issues.

Bacteria are also our friends, not just our enemies. Millions of bacteria live in and on our bodies, helping us to stay healthy, digest foods, and produce nutrients. Without these bacteria to protect us, we would be open targets for the harmful bacteria. Previously we had a mutually supportive relationship with the bacteria and viruses of the environment but it has been disturbed by the addition of massive doses of chemicals. It is time for the medicinal professions to acknowledge that creating stronger antibiotics is not the answer and to learn to work with other life-forms to create health.

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The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth

The End of Antibiotics

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