Dealing With the Usual Suspects
Chipotle has suffered business setbacks. Blue Bell Creameries are permanently closed. Most recently, General Mills has recalled a full lot of their Gold Medal flour. The common thread? E. coli, listeria, salmonella, and all of those pesky bacteria responsible for over four million pounds of food being recalled in the U.S. in 2015 and food poisoning affecting roughly 48 million people.
The methods for detecting bacteria and pathogens in our food have become more sophisticated, so it's likely there have been many unrecorded outbreaks in the past. But then again, the number of cases attributed to the most well-known bacteria that cause food poisoning (like listeria, salmonella, or E. coli), have remained steady over the years, while campylobacter bacteria and rare Vibrio infections are on the rise. When increased detection and better food safety standards still do not result in a decline in pathogens, where does that leave us?
Soooo...Fire?
From food safety 101 we know that food is only considered safe when we heat it enough to kill off harmful bacteria. But what do you do when the bacteria has mutated to withstand those temperatures, like the strain of E. coli discovered by Canadian researchers?
Food safety literature recommends heating beef to 160 degrees, although they also note that 140 degrees is a sufficient temperature to kill harmful bacteria in less than a minute. But the new strain of E. coli does not die. In fact, it lived for over an hour at a temperature of 140 degrees. Right now, 16 genes with this mutation are present in about 2% of E. coli strains (good and bad), but with the other evolutionary strides bacteria have been making, who knows what will happen!
Fire's Out. Soooo...Antibiotics?
People in the U.S. can now look forward to the newest shot fired in the bacteria vs. antibiotic war, now that bacteria has been found to be immune to colistin, a long-acknowledged "antibiotic of last resort". Constant use of antibiotics has encouraged bacteria to evolve, to build up an immunity to these drugs.
An entire group of antibiotics - sulphonamides - is being phased out due to bacteria resistance. Gonorrhea is showing signs of resistance to last resort treatment in 10 different countries, and there are no new antibiotics in development to treat it. Stories like these are becoming more and more common as our extensive use of antibiotics continues to breed stronger bacteria. We respond with new antibiotics and the next generation of the bacteria is more resistant than before. When it ends, do you really think we're going to end up on top?
Can We Actually Control the Bacteria?
If your reaction to hearing all of this bad news about bacteria is to scream something along the lines of, "Kill it with fire!" you're not alone. Solutions like antibiotics, antibacterial soaps, and hand sanitizers came with a price. They became part of the problem.
There are no easy answers here. Ideally, we will stop treating livestock with unneeded antibiotics. We will stop the indiscriminate use of antibiotics to treat infections and seek alternative treatments whenever possible. Maybe we will go so far as to change our diets to build immunity and encourage our natural, protective bacteria to thrive.
Are we past the point that these changes will be enough. Is our microbial world going to end up a cautionary tale a la Jurassic Park? Keep in mind that we can't just seal off the island.
Sources
- Researcher's Warn of New E. Coli Strain That Can 'Survive Cooking' - grubstreet.com
- Germ Resistant to Antibiotic of Last Resort Appears in U.S. - npr.org
- Antimicrobial Resistance - World Health Organization
- Trends in Foodbourne Illness in the United States, 2012 - cdc.gov
- How Food Recalls Really Work - eater.com
So this story is selling the idea that bacteria is evolving. Really the way antibiotics work makes it impossible for any of them to lose their effectiveness: The story is corporate propaganda. Who profits from this story? Who do you think?
Producing inferior antibiotics to work on the same old enemy is what's really the most likely explanation, and where if they were any weaker they would fail completely, but ya know...surprise...for a mere 40 grand we can now save you with a new drug. Now does that sound about right to you?
This story is an example of what's called seeding. Seeding the public mind with storyline. See it's the same hegelian dialectic. Oh we have a developing problem, then we are going to have a crisis, and the guess what? Oh, well a miracle, we have a solution. Now if you could just bend over please. OK? Wake up, we are being shafted and not in a good way.
Antibiotics are extracts from fungi and these guys have been in warfare against bacteria for about 4 billion years, and you know what? During that whole time the enemy, called bacteria, has never once won a battle against fungi. There is no way that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics because fungi would have lost that war long before we humans arrived to claim ourselves the superior species, and if that had happened we wouldn't have ever gotten out of the starting gate.
Fungi produce toxins to kill bacteria because they like to keep all the food that they happen to come across all to themselves, and of course bacteria try to snatch some but the price is death by poison which we call antibiotics.
Practically all fungi produce antibiotics of some kind or other to combat bacteria, and modern antibiotics are based on these substances. OK? So if their were actually some kind of perverted bacteria which had decided to grow legs and go kill humans then it would also be causing a lot of other problems. Do you see bacteria eating fungi? Ah, no you do not. This is a bogus story and it shows how successful the propaganda model is.
I'm sure the author is a good person and has good intentions, but like so many involved in science they have little understanding of criminality and cannot envision the concept of such a sick plot as to actually manufacture a crisis by these means. Sort of like spraying fly ash for the 20 years while denying that was real, and then suddenly having to admit that it was real, but ya know we are trying to save you all. This is about the same kind of mentality and storyline.