http://www.med.nyu.edu/communications/news/pr_219.html
This study lends greater specificity to what we have known for a long time; that most of us is not us, and that most germs are not only not harmful to our health but of benefit and essential to good health.
It also gives weight to the idea that perhaps we should not be so ready to "clear cut" bacteria indiscriminately with antibacterial products and antibiotics.
This tendency has been fed by two huge influences; the medical profession, and the makers and purveyors of hygiene products and pharmaceuticals.
They have wrongly and wrongfully, even criminally spread the notion that we can indiscriminately kill "germs" without harm to the complex ecosystem. Sort of like burning and clearing vast sections of rain forests so that we can grow corn and beans and other "useful" crops, and provide more territory for human habitation.
Only the varieties of the stupidities exhibited by our governments in international relations increase more greatly. We all need to pay much more attention, generate much more effective solutions, and stop buying into simplistic doctrinaire sound-bite answers.
The widespread desire to put a specific name to every skin condition, as one example, may be a gross oversimplification of the sort that we are collectively prone to, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. We want to label and categorize everything. And we want all our answers to be simple and short.
As extinction overtakes more and more species of life, we will see how much more complicated oversimplification has made things.
About Me
- Anthropositor
- Deep South, United States
- Consultant, inventor, mentor, chess coach,. Current projects involve No Till Farming and staving off blindness due to cataracts among other projects. I also do confidential ghost writing (without taking any published credit. My current blindness makes me put this on hold for a while. I should have one eye working again in about four months. Fact, fiction, all subjects considered. I have heard My daughter Jennifer is alive. I would love it if she were to contact me here. I understand she would like to know me. I have sent a message by circuitous route. I can only hope. My posted Email works as well. We have four decades to catch up on.
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6 comments:
Check out the book "The New Killer Diseases" by Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti.
They discuss how the over and improper use of antibiotics, the decrease in the use of common childhood vaccines, (Ridiculous! Why WOULDN'T you want your child to be protected from Chicken Pox, Diptheria, Rubella, and other preventable diseases? They are still out there. There was a student with Whooping Cough at my local elemtry school not more than five years ago) and the dismanteling of clinics, such as NYC's TB clinics have effected the mutation of bacteria to resist the drugs we have.
Thanks Wendy,
I'll keep an eye out for the book.
A former colleague of mine called it, "Single answer searching." By this, he meant that the human organism is largely motivated by finding solutions to problems that satisfy by reducing anxiety about the problem. Once such equilibrium is achieved, most people have no further need to agonize over the question. This probably serves for both the elimination of germs and the search for the real Dr. Bibey. Anyway, I look forward to reading further in your blog. - Ted
www.tedlehmann.blogspot.com
Hi Ted, Thanks for the comment. Looks like it got cross threaded a little. You mentioned Dr. Bibey who I mentioned in "An Imperfect End" five months into the future, at the end of November.
I can only come to one of two possible conclusions: you engage in time travel or you read my archives. I wasn't sure anyone was doing that since most of the comments I get are to my most recent essays.
As it happens your comment seems equally relevant to both posts.
Ooops! Now things are really spooky. I made a comment about something on Dr. Bibey's blog, but I have never written about Dr. Bibey at all on my blog, and as far as I know he hasn't yet visited my blog at all.
Uh Wendy, as long as I'm time traveling here, I should maybe say something about antibiotics and vaccines. Each is quite different. One attacks pathogenic bacteria which are already in the process of making us ill with antibiotics.
Vaccines, on the other hand, are killed, weakened or otherwise denatured bacteria or viruses or components of them which signal the body to react with an immunity response which will later be effective if the patient is exposed to the virulent pathogen.
Both are useful. Both have negative effects too. in some cases a vaccine can even be a different but related organism to the target organism. An example would be using the cowpox organism as a vaccine to prevent smallpox.
Another difficulty with vaccines is that they can sometimes get adulterated with some sort of toxic ingredient like a preservative which might pose some danger for a fraction of the people getting it.
It's a funny world, isn't it? I came back here when I Googled "single answer searcher" only to discover I was Googling myself while seeking the origin of the term. Maybe I should look more closely at your blog. - Ted
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