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RE: Germs, Super Germs and Antibiotic Resistance

in #health7 years ago

Good article and interesting discussion on antibiotic resistance and other diseases. While I was in Nicaragua a few years back, a doctor told me that due to lack of resources, courses of antibiotics were being split up, so that more people could have some antibiotics, with the devastating effect that bacteria were becoming more resistant, and the people weren't beating the infections. I hope that that has changed now that people are more aware of antibiotic resistance!

I have a few comments about your article. I think that some ideas are being implicitly combined, which are actually somewhat separate. For instance, your point about hygiene may be especially relevant to autoimmune diseases (like your asthma example), but is relevant to disease immunity in a different way. You can become immune to certain bacteria and viruses, but not all, and usually the immune system becomes specifically immune to an antigen (i.e. an exposure to lots of bacteria would not make me immune to polio).

In fact, the hygiene hypothesis model of polio proposed that severe polio was less common in lower socioeconomic status because lower socioeconomic status individuals tended to contract polio at an earlier age, when it seemed to have less severe effects on the body - not that people from lower socioeconomic status didn't contract polio as much. See this paper, for example.

Finally, I would also just add the point that vaccines act exactly by stimulating the immune system! Vaccines are super important to the health of large groups of people by conveying herd immunity and very different from antibiotics. Yes, we all want to live in a healthy world with no major disease outbreaks, so let's all get vaccinated, but also use antibiotics sparingly for those who truly need it!

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Like your scientifically informed comment! Need more of these! Checked out your channel too and you got a new follower!

Nice also to hear you make the important point that vaccines ≠ antibiotics. And the article didn't conflate the two, either, which is good.