As an 18 year old veteran of

As an 18 year old veteran of the Hungarian army, I've spent 14 months in a primitive German MASH hospital after the war, in Austria. 3 months with a legwound and 11 months as a volunteer orderly, working mostly with amputees.

We were in a former artillery training camp, under the most primitive conditions. Antibiotics were unknown at the time in Europe. We hardly had any medications and were almost starving, surviving on very low quality foods.

We lived in huts with wooden floors, no clean beds , my future wife's parents were doing the laundry, like blood soaked bandages etc., by hand. No washing machines.

We were amputating, with me holding the legs of the victims, in the dining room of the former camp, with a wooden floor. The doctors and some nurses were wearing rubber gloves and white coats, but nobody had masks. I was wearing some old uniform pants, no gloves, covered down with a sheet with a hole in it to stick the victim's leg through.

Anesthesia was by a nurse dripping ether in a mask on the victim's face. The only treatments the patients had was the changing of the many times washed bandages, paper bandages, and some liquid sulpha squeezed on the wounds with a sringe.

Yet, there were no infections and nobody died.

Some years ago I was talking to a guy who was doing the same job during the Korean war in a proper hospital in Minnesota, with all the antibiotics, medications, cleanliness, best of foods. They had a 30%, some very serious infection rate.

The difference was that in our case, people still had a great degree of immunity and the human body could recover. But even then, after the war, US soldiers had to have special gardeners growing special vegetables both in parts of Europe and especially in Japan, because their bodies have already then been stripped of natural immunities.

Now thew whole world is surviving on daily doses of artificial foods and medications and I'm not surprised to see incurable illnesses sweeping the globe, sooner, or later.

The present epidemics of cancers etc., that didn't exist before, are the best examples, growing by the day, while the chemical food, and drug companies are getting filthy rich and the medical costs of the populations and governments are going ballistic.

Ed Deak.

No, we haven't.

It's just going to take a while to figure out how to restore order.

The war between antibiotics and bacteria is an old one

There have always been incurable diseases and there always will be. Before penicillin and other antibiotics, it was staphylococcal infections, syphilis, polio, smallpox and TB. Add meningitis and a few other killers and there you are.

The overuse of antibiotics has produced resistance, there is no doubt about it. (Doctor, my kid has flu. Give him antibiotics). Transferable drug resistance is an old problem.

Research into new antibiotics has been stalled for decades for various reasons. It doesn't matter; we keep abusing the ones we have, so new antibiotics are not the answer, just more of the same.

No matter how good medical technology gets, people will still die. Thank your lucky stars we do, otherwise this planet would get awful crowded.

That is half the problem; overcrowding. There are too many of us already. Everyone knows that disease spreads quickly through chicken factory farms, and yet people are still flocking to the cities, around the globe.

It may not be flattering to think of humans as factory-farmed chickens, but there are many similarities. For one thing, we squawk at every epidemic like it is the end of the world. Get used to it.

Diet has a great deal to do with susceptability

In the 1970s I ran across "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston A Price at the library. He was a dentist who traveled the world taking photos of people and examining their nutrition and how it altered with the influx of highly sugared modern foods. One of the things he found was that those who lived on a traditional diet had perfect teeth and bone structure and those that were paid in sugar, white flour, jam and tea had crowded rotten teeth, poor bone structure and high levels of TB.
Today a search turned this up:
Treatment of Tuberculosis with a Low Carbohydrate Diet
American Revue of Tuberculosis, 46:238-261, 1942.
Drs. Benjamin P. Sandler and R. Berke
“Guinea pigs fed carbohydrate-rich diet and inoculated with TB developed a more severe and virulent form of TB."“Ten patients with advanced pulmonary TB were placed on a low carbohydrate diet.
(Bread, sugar, etc., completely eliminated.) All ten patients improved in strength, some gained weight, general improvement, healing of cavities and clearing of infiltrations.
DIGESTIVE, CARDIAC, RESPIRATORY, NERVOUS, and MENTAL symptoms were rapidly relieved and relief was sustained"

A few years back, research showed the effects of sugars on the immune system.
"In one study, the ingestion of 100 gram (roughly 3-1/2 ounces) portions of carbohydrate as glucose, fructose, sucrose, honey, and pasteurized orange juice all significantly reduced the ability of white blood cells (neutrophils) to engulf and destroy bacteria. In contrast, the ingestion of 100 grams of starch had no effect. These effects started within less than 30 minutes after ingestion and lasted for over 5 hours. Typically, there was at least a 50% reduction in neutrophil activity two hours after ingestion. Since neutrophils constitute 60-to-70% of the total circulating white blood cells, impairment of their activity leads to depressed immunity."

Poverty is often accompanied by a high sugar, low protein, low vitamin diet making people far more prone to numerous infections.

Judy: So sugar = White Death. I knew it!

What keeps me awake at night is the thought that there are more bacterial cells contained within the human gut than there are human cells in the rest of the body. Thank God they don't all get to vote!

People aren't really human after all. We are walking bacteriology labs. It is enough to put me off dating ever again.

To revive discussion on this topic; Transferable drug resistance

About 40 years ago when I first worked in the pharmaceuatical industry, transferrable drug resistance was a hot topic. The exchange of (mitochonrial?) DNA between organisms of the same and different species was considered a threat.

E.coli from a cow that had been fed anitbiotics could develop resistance, then pass that resistance to other E. coli that had never been subjected to the drug(s).

It was a theoretetical and academic issue back then. Is it in fact a problem today? Is transferable drug resistance the threat it was felt to be in 1972?