Government plan to combat an "Urgent Global Threat. The failure of Antibiotics & the creation of Superbugs leads to the pharmaceutical industry being rewarded for a problem it has caused

The UK government has announced a 5-year plan, and 20-year 'vision', aimed at overcoming antimicrobial resistance, the British government's response to the growing problem of drug resistant bacteria, viruses, parasites infections, and infectious diseases. The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock has said that the situation is so serious that even a simple graze could be deadly:

               "Antimicrobial resistance is as big a danger to humanity as climate change or warfare."

This is the depth to which conventional medicine is failing. This dreadful new world, without effective antibiotic drugs, has previously been described by the government's Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, as 'an antibiotic apocalypse' in June 2015. Yet both the contents of the plan, its urgency, and the reasoning that underlays it, needs to be carefully examined.

We have been told for many years that the overuse of antibiotics is making infections harder to treat, with many thousands of deaths every year being caused by drug-resistant superbugs. And it has been pointed out elsewhere, including in this blog, that this problem is one exclusively for the conventional medical establishment.

The 'threat' is a threat to the conventional medicine, not to medicine. It is NOT a problem for natural medicine, including homeopathy. The government plan fails to recognise this. It makes the usual assumption that conventional medicine = medicine - the whole of medicine, medicine in its entirety, that there is not alternative to it.

The government plan also continues to attempt to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use, by 15% for humans in 5 years, and by 25% for animals over the next year. The problem is that drug companies do not like the idea of selling fewer drugs, and this is one of the main reasons they have decided not to develop new antibiotics. They are in the health business for profit, not for our good!

To counteract this problem the plan proposes to change how it funds pharmaceutical drug companies - to encourage them to develop new drugs, new antibiotics, to deal with conventional medicine's crisis.

The plan asks the drugs advisory body, NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) and NHS England to trial a new payment arrangement which ensure that drug companies are paid for drugs on the basis of how valuable the drugs are rather than by the quantity sold. The government believes that paying drug companies for the amount of antibiotics sold has led to this "market failure". The new new payment method will encourage companies to invest in the development of new antibiotics.

For the drug companies it means the guarantee of a hugely increased price for selling fewer drugs. It is, in other words, a reward for failure. 

So although it is widely accepted that antibiotic drugs have caused the problem of superbugs, and the distress, illness and death they have cause, the plan's solution to the problem produce more, presumably more powerful antibiotics. Conventional medicine never learns!

The mainstream media should be (but aren't) asking an important question. Is the conventional medical establishment (of which the government and the NHS is an important part) able to recognise what has CAUSED the problem of antibiotic resistance, and the CREATION of superbugs?

More of the same failed medicine is NOT a new policy, nor is it a policy likely to have a different outcome, namely more drug resistance, more superbugs, more medical panic, more pharmaceutical profits.

Nor does the plan recognise that antibiotic drugs are now known to cause serious health problems for people who have taken them, often in large quantities over their lifetime. The plan fails to recognise that antibiotic drugs have caused significant patient harm over the 70 years of their existence. Antibiotic drugs are indiscriminate killers of bacteria that over the years have devastated the gut and its micro biome. As a result they are implicated in the rise of obesity, diarrhoea, constipation, asthma, eczema, diabetes, liver damage, heart disease and breast cancer. They are part of the reason for the increase, and even the creation of 'new' diseases like irritable bowel, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and much more.

But apparently none of this matters! None of this is ever mentioned by our doctors, the NHS, or the mainstream media. We are going to get more antibiotics, and drug companies are going to be rewarded for providing them, whether it is good for us or not!

Superbugs. Homeopathy is proven to work - treating like with like.

Conventional medicine has caused many diseases through the side effects of their toxic drugs. Not least amongst these diseases are the result of antibiotic drugs, and the superbugs they have generated. Not least amongst these superbugs is Clostridium difficile.

C. difficile infections cause diarrhoea and fever. It has been estimated that every year it causes 29,000 deaths in the USA alone, but of course, it is ravaging populations in conventional hospitals around the world, so the annual death toll is much greater than this.

The C. difficile bacteria takes over our gut when conventional antibiotic drugs kills off the bugs that normally live there!

If that is not bad enough, the only treatment conventional medicine has been able to offer is more antibiotics! Their warfare against our bodies appears to know no boundaries. As so often said in this blog, our doctors not only create disease, but they have no answer to the disease they cause!

Yet is this about to change? Has conventional medicine found a more effective treatment?

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has recently published information about a new treatment for C. difficile, and according to a BBC article, published on 6th May 2015, it is  causing considerable interest within the conventional medical establishment. So what is this new treatment?

The deadly Clostridium difficile infection is treated with a dose of more C. difficile!

As the BBC article explains it, the aggressive version of the bug in replaced by their 'friendlier cousins', and the result was that repeat infections were cut dramatically.

So the conventional medical establishment has, yet again, stumbled upon the principle of homeopathy (treating like with like), and they have found it to be successful. There is, of course, no attribution to the use of homeopathic principles.

I wrote a similar article in January 2014 about the treatment of peanut allergy was treated by using very minute portions of peanut.

It is pleasing to know that the conventional medical establishment is beginning to stumble upon homeopathy, even if they are not aware of doing so, as yet. As their drugs and vaccines are seen to be causing more harm and disease to patients, they are having to look for something safer and more effective - and this will almost inevitably draw them towards homeopathic treatment.

Yet, don't expect a sudden, 'Road to Damascus' conversion. There is still much resistance to the idea of the safety and effectiveness of homeopathy. This was demonstrated to me when I tweeted the BBC article, some weeks ago, and the answer I received from Richard Stelling, @rjstelling.

Please DO NOT read this response if you are in any way sensitive, or interested in the health outcomes of medical treatment.

     "You Sir, are a fucking idiot. That has nothing to do with your notions of magic water".

This is not, of course, the considered response of the conventional medical establishment, or indeed the response of anyone interested in discussing health issues in a sensible, open-minded or honest way. People like Richard Stelling often attack me in personal terms, using similar language, and I usually ignore them, completely.

Yet this particular remark does demonstrate the amount of anger and resistance that can be generated by the discovery of 'successful' and 'safe' treatments; if and when these treatments highlight the failure of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

So what this research, and the peanut allergy treatment demonstrates is that whilst pharmaceutical drugs cause disease, they have no answer to the treatment of these diseases. The future of health treatment lies with homeopathy, or with treatment that adopt homeopathic principles. It might take a long time to persuade the 'Richard Stelling's' of this world, but they, of course, are quite at liberty to continue accepting conventional drugs and vaccines.

Antibiotics - not such a wonder drug?

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1929, and the long era of antibiotic treatment began. It has led to many different kinds of antibiotic, and most people would probably consider antibiotics to be ‘the wonder-drug of all wonder-drugs’. Certainly, that has been the way it has been presented over the decades, and it is still probably the way that most people would describe them.

Yet even in the 1970’s, antibiotics were creating enormous optimism. This is a statement made by a Dr Moreau (Griggs, p261).

          “If the competitive drug industry is allowed to continue the extraordinary achievements of the last sixty years, by 2036 nearly all the health obstacles to survival into extreme old age will have been overcome”.

This kind of optimism mirrored much of conventional medical propaganda - that there was a prospect of a successful medical answer to all medical problem - that science would soon invent drugs that would deal with all illness and disease. But it was antibiotics that seemed to attract most attention in this respect. The result has been that for generations we have been given an increasing amount of antibiotics for an increasing number of illnesses. They have also been given to the domestic animals we eat, and so have also been plentiful in the food chain.

It is well recognised even within conventional medicine that this ‘overdosing’ on antibiotics has become a problem. Doctors have been urged for years to reduce the number of prescriptions they write. The reason for concern is that over time we have become increasingly resistant to anti-biotics, and there has been a regular process of developing new and stronger forms when the older drugs have become ineffective.

The problem has been that whilst antibiotics kill the bacteria that live within our bodies associated with illness that they kill ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ bacteria (although this kind of  ‘meritorious’ differentiation is probably bogus anyway). There is now evidence that the use, and over-use of antibiotics can cause many problems in health. More important, probably, is the fact that by killing bacteria, antibiotics actually undermine the balance of bacteriological activity within the body - and that this anti-biotic induced imbalance causes other health problems.

Most people believe that antibiotics are safe, and effective - largely because they have never been told otherwise. Yet antibiotics have been withdrawn from the market - even from the early years of development. Griggs (p288) reports on the history of one antibiotic. Chloromycetin was introduced and marketed in the US by the drug company Parke-Davis in 1949. It was hailed for its ability to treat typhoid, and other fairly rare diseases caused by ‘gram-negative’ bacteria. Yet reports began to arise about severe, and even fatal blood disorders.

          “By 1953 the FDA had issued strong warnings, recommending that it should only be used for the original small range of serious diseases. Fourteen years and several warnings later the dangers of chloramphemicol were give enormous publicity in the US press following a Senate hearing on drugs, and sales at last began to drop”.

Since that time there have been many reports that have shown that the effects of antibiotics are far from benign.

Yet the biggest failure of antibiotics has been the rise of superbugs such as MRSA and C-Diff. Bacteria and ‘germs’ have been attacked by antibiotics for decades and now they have fought back. They have adapted and mutated in ways that make them resistant to anti-biotic attack. The result has been described by Sarah Boseley, reporting in the Guardian on 17 January 2007.

Most of the drug companies, meanwhile, no longer have any interest in hunting down new antibiotics because it's not financially worthwhile. Roche has dropped antibiotic research, while GlaxoSmithKline, BristolMyersSquibb and Eli Lilly have all cut down. The only company to have entered the field is Novartis. "Virtually all the pharmaceutical companies that were interested in developing antibacterials have pulled out of research in the field," says Richard Wise, who heads the government's specialist advisory committee on antimicrobial resistance.

The reason given for the withdrawal of the drug companies is that they are no longer interested in developing new antibiotics. On one hand, it is now recognised that bacteria always become resistant to them, and so they do not have a sufficiently long life to justify the expense of developing them. On the other hand, there are more profitable areas for drug companies to research – into diseases such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and ulcers, and drugs such as Statins. These drugs are prescribed for a lifetime, whilst antibiotics are rarely taken for more than a few days at a time.

So whilst antibiotics were once believed to be conventional medicine's greatest achievement, they have ended not only in defeat, but entirely vanquished. The Conventional Medical Establishment appears to have given up the struggle, leaving the battlefield occupied only by MRSA, C-Diff and other bacterial superbugs. This is a staggering development that at some point will demand closer scrutiny - and any closer scrutiny can only serve to deny claims to the medical efficacy of Antibiotics.

Over time, we have become resistant to antibiotics, and new stronger forms of the drug have had to be developed in order to remain effective. Antibiotics kill bacteria that live within our bodies, and whilst for many years it was though that antibiotics were harmless, this has not proven to be true. It is now understood that they kill ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ bacteria (although this kind of meritorious differentiation is probably bogus anyway. More important is the fact that by killing bacteria, antibiotics actually undermine the balance of bacteriological activity within the body – and that this causes other problems.

Yet the problems are probably worse than this. It is not difficult to find reports of anti-biotics that have caused serious problems.

• Dr Mercola reported information from the American Journal of Epidemiology (15 November 2005) that new research from Scandinavia had indicated that the heavy use of antibiotics during childhood increased the likelihood of developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), a cancer that affects the body's lymphatic system. The research compared over 3,000 patients with NHL with a similar number of healthy patients, and found a "striking" association between antibiotic use and NHL … especially for those who had been given antibiotics more than 10 times as children.

• Dr Mercola published an article entitled “Ketek: why did the FDA approve this deadly antibiotic?” in May 2006, its source, Reuters 2 May 2006. It had been shown to cause “toxic effects such as liver damage”.  However, they reversed this decision and approved Ketek, based on the original data, and from a study that used ‘fabricated data’ that led to arrests and prison sentences.

• Dr Mercola also published an article entitled “Another antibiotic found to be killing people” in March 2006. This report concerned the drug Tequin, which was reported as causing “potentially fatal swings in blood sugar”. This was based on article in the New England Journal of Medicine (1 March  2006), stating that “an examination of the medical records of almost 1.5 million people older than 65 showed that those who took Tequin had four times the risk of low blood sugar, and almost 17 times the risk of high blood sugar”, and that “those who took Tequin were also far more likely to be hospitalized for blood sugar problems”. It also said that a number of such patients died.

• In March 2006, BBC News reported a Canadian study of 12,082 children that “suggested that those treated with antibiotics under the age of one year are twice as likely to develop asthma in childhood” It went on to say that researchers writing in the US journal ‘Chest’ found additional courses of antibiotics in the first year of life increased the risk of asthma further. It said that earlier studies on antibiotics showed that the drug “may affect the way the immune system works”.

For more information on the dangers of Antibiotic drugs visit this link.

Superbugs and Antibiotics

News about a 'new' superbug in the UK is beginning to emerge, a bug which cannot be treated by even the strongest antibiotic drugs. See, for example,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10935996

News is emerging at the same time that government ministers are now considering whether to ban antibacterial drugs from  being sold 'over the counter' - because of the public health dangers of rising antibiotic resistance.

http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=4126763&cid=Latest_headlines_1_120810&sp_rid=NDE0NjI1MDQzMgS2&sp_mid=35687853

The NHS and conventional medical doctors have been overprescribing antibiotics for many years, and apparently continue to do so. One reason is that doctors know they have a drug that works, and which for decades, they have thought to be entirely safe.

But you cannot set out to attack/block/inhibit the body, as all pharmaceutical drugs do, without the body having to respond. Nor can you seek to try to attack bacteria, living naturally within the body, and helping to sustain us, without the bacteria fighting back - as they are doing.

 

Conventional medicine and the Creation of Illness

 

So Conventional Medicine is rapidly losing yet another battle - and this one for one of the drugs it has always presented to the public as proof of its effectiveness.