Wonder Drugs?

Within a decade, people could again be dying from diseases which antibiotics have kept in check for the last 50 years.

There is no cure for the common cold. It's hardly a State secret. But every day, sniffling, coughing patients pay a visit to their doctors' surgeries. "Doctor," they say, "I've got a cough arid a runny nose... can I have some antibiotics?" Antibiotics simply don't work against most respiratory problems, such as colds, because the illnesses are caused by viruses, not bacteria. Yet some doctors prescrihe antibiotics anyxvay to patients who insist - they're afraid of losing a patient's business. Others prescribe drugs because it's quicker than explaining why they shouldn't or because they are accustomed to, "just in case", when the cause of an infection is unclear. In surgeries around the world, this scenario is common: patients demanding antibiotics, harried doctors acquiescing, even when they know it is ineffective.

The result is a growing health problem. According to a World Health Organisation report, within a decade we could again be dying of diseases that can now be treated.

The report, Overcoming antimicrobial resistance, paints a frightening picture of how almost all the world's main infectious diseases are slowly, but surely, becoming resistant to existing medicines.

In Thailand, for example, 98 per cent of gonorrhoea strains are now resistant to penicillin, wich had been the first-line treatment for decades. A decade ago in India, typhoid could be cured with the use of three inexpensive drugs. Today, these drugs are largely ineffective. In eastern Europe, Russia and China, more than 10 per cent of tuberculosis patients have strains resistant to the two most powerful antibiotics.

The problem is greatest in poorer countries, but even in the United States, about 14,000 people die each year frorn drug-resistant microbes that infect them in hospitals. Globalisation, says the WHO report, means that these new strains travel quickly and no country is immune.

As antibiotics fail, diseases that in the West had heen forgotten, or read about only in Chaucer or 19th-century novels, are coming back. Two thousand cases of bubonic plague, which wiped out a third of Europe's population in the 14th century, are still reported worldwide every year. Last year, strains resistant to a number of antibiotics were discovered.

Resistant strains of tuberculosis (Tb) have been found everywhere, including Australia and New Zealand, with particularly high rates in Latvia, Russia, Argentina, and Thailand.

These strains now kill 60,000 Europeans a year in the European Union alone. In the early 90s, New York City had to spend almost $1 billion to control an outbreak of multi-drug-resistant Tb.

The blame for these reinvigorated diseases, according to the WHO report, lies with the way we use medicines. In the developing world, the problem is underuse; in wealthy societies, overuse. In poorer countries, many patients can only afford part of the full course of a medicme, or they take poor-quality counterfeit, drugs. A wrong dose will kill only the weakest microbes in the body, leaving the stronger, already more resistant, microbes to survive and multiply.

On the other hand, in countries like Australia and New Zealand, too many doctors are prescribing antibiotics wrongly, and too many patients are demanding them excessively. The more antibiotics are used, the more opportunities bugs have to develop resistance to them. The report estimates that antibiotics are needed about half the time they are prescribed.

Antibiotics are also being overused in livestock feeding: worldwide, half of all antibiotics are used on animals. Once agribusiness discovered that antibiotics were a cheap way of fattening livestock, their use in intensively farmed animals soared. But when humans eat pigs or chickens that have been fed antibiotics, resistance to the drugs moves up the food chain. A federal advisary committee on antibiotic resistance found last year that antibiotics fed to animals results in resistant bacteria being passed on to humans. Antimicrobial resistance is a naturally occuring biological phenomenon. That means we would have struck this problem anyway, sooner or later.

In fact, the first awareness of antibiotic-resistant drugs came in the late 60s, only a decade after the first major antibiotic, penicillin, became widely available.

The emerging resistance, however, was countered by waves of new antibiotics. But the last big class of new antibiotics was produced in the early 80s. The world became complacent: infectious disease was beaten. Drug companies scaled back investment into new antibiotics.

Meanwhile, human misuse of antibiotics has encouraged antibiotic resistance to develop much earlier than it might have.

Responsibility for reducing antibiotic use rests not only with doctors, but with improving public education. Experts point out that many people go through life ignorant of the difference between a virus and bacteria (note: viri are NOT killed by antibiotics, whereas Electro-Colloidal Silver has proven extensively to do so).

One of the major concerns for doctors fighting antibiotic resistance is VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococci). In the past five years, the prevalence of VRE, which can cause a potentially fatal infection, has increased rapidly in the US and Europe.

Doctors fear the bug's resistance to the antibiotic vancomycin will cross to staph aureus, the bacterium commonly known as golden staph. Vancomycin is the antibiotic of last resort for the most dangerous infections, including golden staph.

Golden staph is endemic in most hospitals and is one of the most common causes of hospital-acquired infection, but has been killed by Electro-Colloidal Silver very quickly in independent lab-tests.

But not all the news is bleak. Last month in the US, the first of what is likely to be a new class of antibiotics was approved by the government.

Called Linezolid, it is for hospital use only, against the most severe infections. Linezolid can treat VRE and multi-resistant golden staph, but the manufacturer, Pharmacia & Upjohn, warns against complacency. The drug will be available on a case-by-case basis when no other treatment is possible.

The World Health Organisation's executive director of communicable diseases, Dr David Heymann, says the world may have only a decade or two left of optimal use of existing antibiotics.

Dr Heymann says the task is to bring levels of infectious disease down worldwide before the diseases wear the drugs down first. "We're literally in a race against time."

Melbourne Age

Does Colloidal Silver fight the anthrax organism?

"Silver - both in liquid solution and as an airborne-aerosol - has been known since 1887 to be extremely toxic to Anthrax spores (1,10,11,12). And it is widely reported in the medical literature on Silver that various forms of Silver, often at surprisingly low concentrations, routinely kills germs that are known to be antibiotic-resistant (11,13,19,20)." James South MA

Antibiotic-resistant germs are now considered epidemic in the United States, accounting for a growing number of serious infectious disorders. While most antibiotics disinfect about a half dozen or so germs, silver has been reported to disinfect hundreds. Most importantly, unlike conventional antibiotics, germs cannot build a resistance to the action of silver. A properly prepared colloid of silver is a special liquid preparation of this trace mineral that is extremely safe to use, even with children and pets, without many of the negative side effects of prescription antibiotics. ...