- Make It Yourself Lavender Heart-Shaped Bath Bombs!
- 20 Things You Never Knew About “Down There”
- 12 Best Foods For Those Suffering From Arthritis Pain
- 12 Personal Hygiene Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes (Mom Never Told You About #4!)
- 15 Medicinal Plants And Herbs From The Cherokee People
- 12 Mind-Blowing Benefits Of Drinking Coconut Water During Pregnancy
- 12 Outstanding Winter Foods That Won’t Fatten You Up Like A Christmas Turkey
Kill Deadly Superbugs with This One Common Fruit Extract
Photo credit: bigstock.com
You might have been hearing about “superbugs,” those antibiotic resistant bacteria that are more than an occasional abnormality, but are causing a real problem in hospitals and prisons all over America. Although these superbugs have been around for about 20 years, they are becoming more common as well as stronger with each passing year. How did these superbugs come to be, anyway? Is there anything we can do to stop them?
Actually, we created these superbugs by our overuse of antibiotics. After decades of overuse, there are now very specific strains of bacteria that are not affected by our current antibiotic knowledge. If you should become infected with one of these superbugs, oftentimes there is little that modern medicine can do except try to fight it with what’s at hand and leave the rest up to your immune system.
Doctors are aware of this problem, but it hasn’t stopped them from being penny wise and pound foolish, so to speak. Doctors do not want to listen to a patient complain that they aren’t doing anything for their cold/flu or other viral infection, so they write a prescription for antibiotics, knowing that these antibiotics do nothing to stop a virus, but knowing full well that they are contributing to the superbug problem.
We only contributed (and still are) to this problem by removing the natural function of something as simple as soap and water. Soap and water, which works perfectly at removing bacteria from hands by washing it down the drain but not necessarily killing it, now it seems as if every soap is an anti-bacterial soap, which has only made bacteria stronger.
Here are a few facts about how antibiotics work. Antibiotics aren’t like a chalkboard eraser, wiping everything off the board in one fell swoop. Antibiotics are more like rising water in a bathtub. The majority of the nasty bugs are “drowned” right away. But others are higher up on the water level, and still some others are clinging right on the top lip of the tub. This is why when people stop taking antibiotics before the full 7 or 10 day period, the more resistant bacteria live and reproduce, making more “babies” exactly like themselves: resistant to the next round of bacteria. Read more about life after antibiotics.
The bad news is these superbugs and ever more virulent strains of pathogens are something we are going to have to live with. The most common form of the bacteria, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is now being found all over the United States. There are a couple of other bugs that are right on the brink of superbug status: acinetobacter baumannii and enterococcus faecium. In fact the first one we mentioned A. baumannii, is currently so strong that only 1 type of antibiotic is effective against this string. This is a type of “flesh eating” bug that has a mortality rate of anywhere from 10 to 60 percent. Once it is able to overcome, to resist, the one antibiotic that currently kills it, there will be no stopping it.
Continue to Page 2
