“The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.” Deuteronomy 28:22
Microbes are organisms too small for the eye to see and are found everywhere on earth. There are many types of microbes: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. While most microbes are harmless and even beneficial to living organisms, some can cause disease among humans, animals, and plants.
What are bacteria?
Bacteria are microscopic, single-celled organisms that live in enormous amounts throughout the earth. In fact, they are found everywhere on earth. Most bacteria are harmless and are, in fact, necessary to sustain life on earth. Bacteria in the soil helps organic material decompose, e.g. trees, plants, animal life. The decayed material is what makes soil fertile. Bacteria also take nitrogen from the air, which plants use for nutrition. There is up to 3 billion bacteria in a gram of soil. The total amount of bacteria on Earth is five million trillion trillion (that is a 5, followed by 30 zeroes).
In fact, our bodies contain 10 times more bacteria than human cells. Our body contains 10 trillion cells and 100 trillion bacteria. The largest number of bacteria are contained in our stomach, intestines and on our skin. The average person has 2–5 pounds of bacteria in their body. There are more bacteria in our intestines than there are people on earth. In fact, we have 500-1,000 species of bacteria in our intestines. Even in our body, bacteria is present for our benefit. In the stomach, bacteria help us to break down carbohydrates so that our body can digest and absorb nutrients from our food. Bacteria in our gut (intestines) help protect against other disease-causing bacteria that may come from the food and water we eat. They are also needed to make Vitamin K and biotin (B7), both essential vitamins for our body. The bacteria on our skin help to crowd out other harmful bacteria from infecting us. Most bacteria in our body are harmless; we are protected from them hurting us by our immune system. Some bacteria even help to boost our immune system by assisting in the function of immune cells.
If bacteria are so beneficial, why are we scared of them? It is because not all bacteria are beneficial. Harmful bacteria have always existed since sin entered into the world. Of all the bacteria in the world, 1% actually cause deadly infectious diseases in man, animals and plants. In humans, some of these diseases include cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy, tuberculosis, pneumonia, tetanus, and the bubonic plague. Throughout history, bacterial infections have caused the death of millions of people. In the 1300s, 25 million people died in Europe from the bubonic plague. Reports from ancient Egypt talk about smallpox epidemics, with mummies examined from that time having evidence of smallpox scars on their faces. Even in the 20th century, before it was eradicated, smallpox killed 300 million people worldwide. Tuberculosis (historically called consumption) was considered a death sentence, even in Sister White’s time. Her son died from a form of pneumonia bacteria.
Bacteria also cause less deadly infections, such as strep throat, urinary tract infections, skin and wound infections. However, all these infections, if not treated, have the potential to cause severe complications and even death. In the past, people died from infected wounds. Infections often killed more people in battle than the wounds themselves. Eighty percent of soldiers who had wound infections, died. However, even without effective treatments, not everyone who was infected died. There was always a percentage who survived, whose
immune system was able to counteract the disease. Throughout history, high infant mortality rates were always present because babies are born without the full complement of good bacteria to prevent infections. Thus, they are more susceptible to disease.
The most common fatal bacterial infections at the present time are respiratory infections, with tuberculosis killing about 2 million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Even with vaccines and treatments available, certain bacteria still kill in large numbers in areas where these are not available. For example tetanus, a bacteria that most people in the developed countries have been vaccinated against, still kills 500,000 people a year.
Even the beneficial bacteria that we have in our bodies can cause disease if it travels to another part of our body. For example, E. coli bacteria help break down the food in our intestines so that we can absorb its nutrients, but, in our urinary tract, E. coli causes infections. Staphylococcus bacteria on our skin protect us from other harmful bacteria, but if we get a cut or wound, staphylococcus can travel into our body and cause an infection. Staphylococcal toxins are a common cause of food poisoning; they can be produced by bacteria growing in improperly stored food items.
Bacteria replicate very quickly. One bacterium can create 16 million bacteria in just eight hours. This is significant when it comes to disease-causing bacteria. A bacterial infection can spread very quickly once it develops. Bacteria replicate by dividing into two parts after the DNA contained in the original cell splits into two parts. Each new bacterium contains the identical DNA from the original cell.
What are antibiotics?
An antibiotic is defined as a substance that inhibits the growth of or destroys bacteria. Antibiotics work either by preventing bacteria from forming or from replicating. Most of the readers of this article will have been prescribed an antibiotic at some point in time in their life. Since their discovery, antibiotics have saved the lives of millions of people who would have otherwise died.
History of antibiotics
Throughout the ages, people used various substances to treat infections. During ancient times, Greeks and Indians used moulds and other plants to treat infections. In Greece, mouldy bread was used to treat wounds. Babylonian doctors used a mixture of frog bile and sour milk. Warm soil was used in Russia by the peasants to cure infected wounds. All of these substances contained natural bacteria-fighting properties.
In 1928, a Scottish scientist named Alexander Fleming made a discovery that would change the world. He noted that a specific blue-green mould was attacking and killing bacteria contained in a petri dish in his lab. This mould, identified as penicillium notatum, revolutionized medicine and treatment of bacterial infections. Penicillin was the first antibiotic discovered; and, for the first time in the history of the world, antibiotics became the treatment for bacterial infections. No longer would diseases such as pneumonia kill people by the millions. Most antibiotics that have followed penicillin have also been derived from plant and animal life, and are completely natural. Now pharmaceutical companies are able to also synthetically manufacture antibiotics in large volumes, but they still use the natural antibiotic as the base. Today, over 100 different antibiotics are available to cure minor, and life-threatening infections. The majority of bacterial infections can now routinely be cured by antibiotics, including the ones that typically killed millions of people in the past.
Today, in North America, deaths by infectious bacterial diseases are only one-twentieth of what they were in 1900, before any antibiotic chemicals had been discovered. The main causes of death today are what are referred to as “the diseases of old age”: heart disease, kidney disease and cancer. Nowadays, we would be shocked to hear of someone dying from an infection that started in a scratch; before antibiotics, it was common for people to die from such infections.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria
But now, only 80 years since the introduction of antibiotics, the world has also created a monster. Bacteria, like any other animal or plant life, have adapted to the medicines that are trying to kill them, through a process known as “survival of the fittest;” the strongest of its species is able to resist disease, toxins, etc. When a person has been prescribed an antibiotic for an infection, the bacteria mount a defense against this attack. Most of the time, the antibiotic is able to kill all the bacteria. However, sometimes, a certain bacteria is strong enough to survive the attack and doesn’t die. The strains which survive are the ones that then replicate and reproduce. Bacteria that are not killed or stopped by antibacterial drugs may also change in form so that they resist attack against their cell walls—or even produce enzymes that kill the antibiotics. What this has done to bacteria is that it has made them stronger and more able to resist whatever is trying to kill it; and in this case it is an antibiotic. The strongest of the bacteria are able to fight an antibiotic and live, causing a super-strain of bacteria that can potentially resist against any and all antibiotics. Over the last several decades, over-use of antibiotics has reached an all-time high. The result has been drug-resistant bacteria and “superbugs” that evolve faster than scientists can figure out how to fight them.
The medical community is also responsible for treatment-resistant bacteria. Doctors prescribe antibiotic drugs to their patients when they are not needed. Sometimes, they are given to people who have a viral, not a bacterial infection. Antibiotics have no effect on viruses, but it will kill off the harmless and even beneficial bacteria living in the person’s body. The surviving resistant bacteria, free from competition, will live and multiply and may eventually cause disease. Or the doctor does not test the strain of bacteria present before prescribing an antibiotic, and they give the wrong one, causing the disease-causing bacteria to continue multiplying. Then there is the problem that people do not take the antibiotic as prescribed. People stop taking the antibiotic as soon as they start feeling better. Not all the bacteria will have been killed. A small number of semi-resistant bacteria, which needed the full course of antibiotics to kill them, survive. The more resistant bacteria take over, and the infection returns, but in a much stronger form. People also are prescribed antibiotics for long periods of time for chronic problems. All these contribute to the development of resistant strains of bacteria.
The use of antibiotics in animal feed to promote animal growth has also led to the development of hardier strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In North America, 70% of antibiotic use is in farm animals. People who eat meat also ingest treatment-resistant bacteria. Now people become the host to these resistant strains. People are also ingesting antibiotics in their food, which also causes the stronger bacteria in their bodies to build up a resistance to antibiotics. Since the first generalized use of antibiotics in the 1940s, most known bacterial diseases have built up a resistance to one or more antibiotics. And there are some bacterial diseases that do not respond to any known antibiotic. People are dying of strains of bacteria that now have no known cure.
For example, some of the most deadly infections were once mostly harmless bacteria that many of us have living on the surface of our skin, but has now mutated into something that could kill us. The staphylococcus aureus bacteria has developed strains that can now cause “flesh-eating disease.” Many hospital environments carry methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which causes deadly infections in patients who are already weakened by disease and illness. Methicillin refers to the antibiotic which, in the past, had been able to cure the staphylocuccus aureus bacteria. The names of others of the most deadly infections are also called by the antibiotic that they are resistant to, e.g. vancomycin-resistant enterococci, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. Patients who are admitted to hospital for any number of reasons, can pick up one of these deadly bacteria, and because the person is already sick and their immune system is weak, they can die from the bacterial infection that they acquired in the hospital instead of being able to go home after being treated for the illness that brought them to hospital. People are dying of infections for which there is no antibiotic strong enough to combat it. And now the fear is that these deadly infections, instead of being confined to small areas of the world, will become more prevalent and start killing people in large numbers.
Scientists have determined that unless new antibiotics are discovered, or we change the way we use antibiotics, in a few years we could be back to the time prior to the discovery of antibiotics, and millions of people will die from simple infections again. There is a hunt for new antibiotics. Scientists comb the world, going to the remotest places, in caves, in the middle of jungles, in the waters of the Arctic, hoping to find a new, previously unknown mould, or algae, or organism that may be the next cure for the stronger strains of bacteria that exist. Research in newer types and combinations of drugs is ongoing, as is research in the development of vaccines to prevent bacterial infections. In only 80 years, antibiotics, while they still cure, have also become a curse. Is there an answer to the current situation which exists? Perhaps the answer is not only in finding a cure, but also in preventing infections in the first place. Strengthening our immune systems to prevent bacterial infections from taking hold is part of the solution. We will learn more about this next month.
Part 2: Solutions to the antibiotic-resistance problem.