My guest today is Martin J. Blaser, MD, author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. We’ll be talking about how the massive increases in the developed world of “modern plagues”—such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, asthma, allergies, esophageal cancer, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and autism—are related to loss of diversity of the complex—and crucially important—ecosystem of microorganisms within our bodies on which we all depend. As diversity diminishes, our immune systems are compromised, and we become much more susceptible to new infections. And this loss of micro-organism diversity is due to the use of wide use of antibiotics and products that contain antibacterials such as triclosan. 
Dr. Blaser has studied the role of bacteria in human disease for more than thirty years. He is the director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University, the former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and has held major advisory roles at the National Institutes of Health. He cofounded the Bellevue Literary Review, and his work has been written about in many newspapers and journals, including The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City. www.martinblaser.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Antiobiotics and Antibacterials Are Compromising Our Health
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Martin Blaser, MD
Date of Broadcast: June 12, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, this is Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, June 12th, 2014 and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida.
We are having a very interesting show. I don’t like to say that, because I think all the shows are interesting. But this one is unique and different and it’s something we’ve never talked about before.
My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser. He’s written a book called Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling our Modern Plagues. We’re going to be talking about all these different illnesses that look like they’re separate and distinct like obesity, type 1 diabetes, asthma, allergies, esophageal cancer, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, autism.
All of these, he says, are related to the loss of the diversity of the complex and crucially important ecosystem of microorganisms in our bodies. Every function in our bodies depends on these microorganisms, and these are being killed off by things like antibiotics and anti-bacterials.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I think this is going to be very interesting. Welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio, Dr. Blaser.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: It’s great to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. I think your book is so interesting. And when I saw it, I thought we’ve never talk about this before. This is not something I have ever seen, and yet it seems so remarkably simple and obvious. How did you get interested in researching this?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: First, before I answer your question, which is a wonderful question, I wanted to just say that listening to you – you know, here’s a guy who’s saying all of these diseases are due to a change in our microbes. To me, it sounds quite grandiose.
But actually, I think it’s true. I’m going to try to explain why I think it’s true and tell you from the beginning that at this point, it is a hypothesis, but there is more and more support for the hypothesis.
So the story began in two different places. The first place is that many years ago, I was working for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta in their Enteric Disease Branch. That’s the branch that deals with infections to the intestinal track. And I was the Salmonella Surveillance Officer of the United States. I was involved in studying salmonella.
At that point, we were very concerned about antibiotic resistance in salmonella because more and more salmonellas were not being easily treated with antibiotics.
And at that point, more than 30 years ago, I learned that most of the antibiotics used in the United States are used on the farm. They’re not used for people. They’re used on a farm. In particular, they’re used to fatten up farm animals. It’s what’s called the ‘growth promotion’.
In the 1940s, farmers found that if they fed their livestock low doses of antibiotics, their livestock would gain weight and they reduced their feed more efficiently. This is much more profitable for farmers. And that’s why the use of antibiotics is still extensive on the farm and why it’s continued, because of the strong economic motivation.
DEBRA: Okay. As we’re talking about that, let me just say something about that first. As you’re talking about that, I’m thinking back to my teenage years when I was given low doses of antibiotics for acne. I think that that’s the standard treatment. Of course, I gained weight. I just think of all these people who are on antibiotics for different reasons and obesity.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, exactly. So you’ve skipped a little ahead of me, but we’re going to the same place.
And so about 10 years ago, a light bulb went off. I thought to myself, if farmers are feeding antibiotics to their livestock to make them fatter, what are we doing to our kids? Could there be an unintended consequence of all the antibiotic use that our kids are getting?
And another thing that the farmers found is that the earlier in life they started the antibiotics, the more profound the effect, suggesting that early childhood was particularly important.
And now, I will skip forward and tell you that over these last 10 years, we’ve been doing experiments in mice and other laboratory animals to ask the question, “Do antibiotics change the development of the mice? Do they change how obese they’re going to be?” And the answer is yes.
We have done a whole series of studies. We had a big paper that was published a year and a half ago in Nature that shows that giving antibiotics to mice changed their body composition. They had more fat. They changed their metabolic pathways in their liver. So we have more and more experimental support that this hypothesis is actually correct.
DEBRA: Wow! I’m just stunned to hear this. When I think about the billions of dollars being spent on people trying to lose weight, not to mention the personal way that people feel being overweight and the health effects of being overweight, this is something – this is the first time I’m hearing this, and I read a lot.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: It’s interesting, because I’m a physician. In fact, my specialty is infectious diseases. And as infectious disease doctors, one of our main occupations is to oversee the use of antibiotics in ill people to consult with other doctors with people who are really sick.
And of course, we love antibiotics. I want to say that I love antibiotics. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where there were not antibiotics because from the very introduction in the 1940s, these drugs were miraculous. There were people on the brink of death who were saved because of antibiotics and disease that were untreatable were cured with antibiotics.
And as a result of that, we all considered that antibiotics were miraculous. Because we couldn’t see there were some minor and infrequent side effects that basically, they were safe. So everyone, myself included, gave antibiotics a clean bill of health.
Little by little, the medical profession and the public began using antibiotics more and more and more for milder and milder conditions – not just the conditions that were life-threatening, but for mild conditions like acne or to prevent acne. Now I’m not saying that acne can’t be terrible, but it’s certainly milder than a case of spinal meningitis for example.
So in 2010, the Center for Disease Control did a study of antibiotic use in the United States. What they found was astounding to me. They found in the United States for outpatients, not even including people in the hospital, for outpatients, there were 258 million courses of antibiotics prescribed in that year. And that’s in a population of 300 million people. So what that meant is that in 2010, there were five courses of antibiotics prescribed for every six people. This has been going on year after year after year.
And the CDC looked at the data by age. And you can extrapolate that and say that the average child in the United States by the time they’re two has had three courses of antibiotics. By the time they’re 10, they’ve had 10 courses. And by the time they’re 20, they’ve had 17 courses of antibiotics. That’s the average child. That’s across every child in the United States.
These numbers may seem high, but they’re entirely consistent with many other studies that have been done. None had been done on this big a scale. So this enormous antibiotic use and nobody has been paying attention to what the consequences could be.
DEBRA: We’re going to need to go to a break in about 30 seconds, so I’m not going to ask you another question because I don’t want to have to interrupt you.
But I think that this is incredible. It’s just another taste of having there be an industrial product that people look at as being a miracle. And then time goes by – not even just a miracle, but something that’s not harmful. Time goes by, we start seeing that it has profound effects.
We’re going to talk about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, M.D., author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling our Modern Plagues. You can go to his website and find out more at MartinBlaser.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, author of Missing Microbes .
Dr. Blaser, I want to just back up for a minute now that we know where the story began. You talk about the microbiome. Explain to us what that is.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, certainly. So the microbiome is all the microbes that live in and on the human body. That’s a very big number of microbes. In fact, if you take a census of all the cells in the human body, 70% to 90% of them are microbes. Only 10% to 30% are human cells. So we are mostly microbial cells.
And that’s the way it’s been since time in memorial. We got lots of our microbes from our moms, and she got it from her mom, and so on and so forth, all the way back. In fact, ever since there had been animals on this planet, which is about 500 million years, they have had residential microbes living in them.
We now know that most of these microbes are beneficial to us – beneficial or neutral. But in depth, they’re beneficial. They do important things for us. They help protect us against invaders. They help train our immune system. They help us digest food. They make vitamins for us. So the microbes that had been living with us are there for a purpose. They help us live.
DEBRA: I think that most people, if you say microbes, they think that they’re in the intestines, but where are some places in your body that they might be?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Well, the biggest group are in our intestines, but they’re in our mouth, they’re in our skin and our ears, eyes. In women, they’re in the vagina. So we have been living with these microbes since time immemorial.
And one of the things that have happened is that because infectious diseases have been so terrible like cholera and tuberculosis and typhoid fever, the public has always been fearful of these tremendous plagues. I’ll call those ‘our ancient plagues.’ The advent of sanitation and antibiotics had been a godsend. So we have now controlled these ancient plagues.
We, as a society, have become germaphobic. We think that all microbes are bad like cholera and plague and tuberculosis. Of course, some of them are, and we are at war with those guys. But most of the microbes in the human body, most of the microbes in the world are neutral or beneficial for us.
And that’s a greater level of sophistication that I try to bring out in Missing Microbes . The the whole title of Missing Microbes is that we have lost some of our defenders. We have lost some of our friendly organisms that help our babies grow up and develop normally – develop normal metabolism, normal immunity and maybe even normal cognition.
DEBRA: So it seems like that there needs to be a balance between protecting ourselves from the harmful microbes and not destroying the good microbes.
An example that I frequently give is that when we drink tap water that has chlorine or chloramine in it, it’s put there for a reason because it was found that it was needed to do that so that the harmful microbes that might be in the system or even in the pipes.
Often, people will ask me, “Why did they put it chlorine and the chloramine at the water treatment plant? Why don’t they just leave it out and then the water can come to our house clean?” Well, they have to put it in because the pipes that the water goes through are contaminated with all kinds of microorganisms that could get in the water and then cause us harm if we drink that tap water.
But then, we drink that tap water (I filter my water and I’m always telling people to filter their water), but if people don’t filter the chlorine or the chloramines out of their tap water, they drink the antibacterial, chlorine or chloramines, it goes into their intestines at least and starts killing off the beneficial bacteria.
So how can we protect ourselves without destroying ourselves?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: That is really the question because the chlorination of water was a tremendous advance in public health. We have clean water. We can turn on the tap, and we know that that water is safe to drink. But in many parts of the world (in India; in Africa, and parts of Asia), we can’t. And people are becoming ill, they’re dying for many kinds of diseases because of dirty water.
So as you say, we have to find the right balance between things that protect us against pathogens but, don’t do in our beneficial organisms. Again, this is one of the themes of Missing Microbes .
I want to point out (because there’s so much to talk about and so little time) that I gave you the figures for the United States in antibiotic use. And a few months after that paper was published by the CDC investigators, a group in Sweden published their use of antibiotics. I first want to point out that, as I think all your listeners know, Sweden is a small country with a high standard of living. The Swedes are at least as healthy as we are and they are using 40% of the antibiotics that we’re using at every age.
When our children at three had four courses of antibiotic, they have had 1.4. When our kids have had 10, they’ve had 4. So there’s no epidemic of childhood deafness in Sweden or early childhood mortality. They’re doing just fine. What that implies is that at least 60% of the antibiotics we’re using are unneeded.
So one of the things I’m calling for is the much more judicious use of antibiotics. Use them when we really need them and don’t use them the other times. That requires education of doctors and it also requires education of the public that antibiotics are not free. They come with cost, biological cost.
And when people bring their kids to the doctor and the doctor says, “Your child doesn’t need an antibiotic, those parents should feel relieved, not deprived.
DEBRA: Yes. I remember many years ago (I don’t even know how many years ago it has been now), I remember being told that if I take an antibiotic, that I should eat yogurt to restore some of the bacteria, the beneficial bacteria that’s being destroyed by the antibiotic.
I don’t know that that’s even commonly known even now, but it was something that I was told a long time ago. Nowadays, I would probably say, “Take a probiotic or drink Kombucha tea or something like that to restore the flora in the gut after taking an antibiotic.” But always, it would be preferable to do something else instead of taking the antibiotic.
But as you said—we need to go to break. So let’s just go to break and come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I know there’s so much to talk about. I just want to go on and on.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, M.D. He’s the author of Missing Microbes and we have lots to talk about. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, author of Missing Microbes .
Dr. Blaser, right before the break, I said something you wanted to jump in, so go ahead and give me your answer.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: You talked about what you should do after you take an antibiotic. Should you take yogurt? Should you take a probiotic? Should you take some special teas?
Most of that is folk wisdom. Very little of it has been studied. It’s not clear to me whether that’s any better than a placebo. I think we are going to learn through science, we’re going to learn what organisms we have to give back after somebody takes an antibiotic.
One of my theories is that every time somebody takes an antibiotic, of the thousands of species that we have in our body, a few go extinct. And the next time, a few more go extinct.
Now, what’s the chance that that’s true? There is some support for this idea because we know if we compare people in the United States with people in developing countries, we’ve lost diversity. We have just a smaller census of different kinds of bacteria than they do.
So what’s the chance that taking one or two organisms in yogurt are going to restore our diversity? Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
DEBRA: It’s not. It’s not. think that people don’t really realize that yogurt has very few strains of…
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, very few strains. But let me just say…
DEBRA: And if you’re taking a probiotic, it’s very few strains as well.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: The same, exactly. Let me just say that I eat yogurt everyday. I love yogurt. But I eat it because it’s delicious. And I think it gives me a lot of nutrients. But I don’t think it’s helping my microbiome. It’s neither helping nor hurting my microbiome. I think we need to discover the organisms that we’ve lost and replace them. Maybe, we’ll be giving them to our kids in the future.
DEBRA: Wow! As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about what you said in your book that mothers pass on microbes with their children in various ways when they’re born. And if the mothers don’t have those microbes, then the children don’t have them from the beginning of life.
And if they were taking antibiotics and continuing to lose and lose them and lose them, that if the things that we’re doing thinking that we’re replacing some of those are not necessarily lining up with what we’ve lost, then I can see how the pool of diversity of microbes is just getting smaller and smaller.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes. A number of years ago, we speculated that this loss of microbes, this loss of diversity is actually cumulative across generations, that each generation of moms has fewer microbes to pass onto the next.
And again, we’re finding evidence that this is true. That was the theory, but we’re beginning to find evidence that this is true.
And that’s very alarming because the recent suggestion is that we’ve lost perhaps a third of our diversity. It’s silent. You can’t tell when somebody has lost their diversity. The only way we can tell is that we have all these diseases that are rising.
We come back to my original grandiose idea. Let’s just say we have 10 diseases that have risen dramatically since World War II. You’ve mentioned them, obesity, juvenile diabetes, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, food allergies, peanut allergy, and the list goes on.
So either each of those is rising independently and each has its own cause or there’s one commonality, something that is underlying all of them. The one thing that could fit that is big enough to encompass all of them is changes in the early life microbiome, the microbiome that our babies are developing with, that are choreographed to help our normal development, and that we have been inadvertently changing.
One of the things you mentioned was about birth. My wife, Maria Gloria Dominguez, has been studying this for the last few years. She’s been studying the difference between babies born vaginally and by C section.
So we humans are mammals. For the last hundred million years, all mammals are born by passes through the birth canal. They go out through their mom’s vagina and in the process, they’re picking up their mom’s bacteria. They’re covered with bacteria, they’re swallowing the bacteria. Those become the founding bacteria to help them start their life.
So this is what mammals have been doing for 100 million years including us. Then we started doing C sections, which again are an incredible operation. They are life-saving sometimes for babies and for moms, but we’re doing more and more and more.
So most recently in the United States, we were up to about 32% of babies now born by C section. That’s one baby out of three. In Brazil, it’s about 50%. And all over the world, C sections are rising.
What Gloria has shown and others is that the microbiota, when the baby is born vaginally and by C section, is quite different. So all these kids born by C section are not being born with the normal compliment of microbes passed from mom the way they were back in the old days. This is what I point out in Missing Microbes . Just because something is common, it doesn’t mean it’s right.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. As you’re talking, I’m getting this picture of like a science fiction movie and the future of people fighting over the microbes that they’re supposed to have when they’re born. Because we don’t pass them on anymore, there’s like this secret stash of the microbes that you’re supposed to have and that everybody is supposed to get one of these capsules at birth.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Actually, we’re hoping to develop that stash. We’re hoping to understand what are the microbes we’ve lost, what are those missing microbes, develop them and give them to kids.
There’s an organism I’ve been studying for about 30 years called Helicobacter pylori, which was first discovered as a pathogen causing ulcers and stomach cancer. We were involved in those studies on stomach cancer as well. The more we studied it, the more it became clear to me that this is one of those ancient organisms that are disappearing. That was my first missing microbe. And I thought, “If one microbe that is an ancient microbe is disappearing, probably there are others.” That’s the where the whole idea came from.
But in 1998, in the British Medical Journal, I predicted that doctors of the future would be giving H. pylori back to children. So far, nothing has happened. And I think it’s actually still too early because we still have to do a lot of science to understand this, but it is my belief that that will be coming. We’re going to be giving H. pylori and other organisms back to kids so that we can get the early-life benefits of those organisms and maybe then eradicate the organisms later so we don’t have the late-in-life cost.
DEBRA: Well, people are already taking probiotics and prebiotics. So this is just more biotics. We need to go to break again. But what I want to ask you is (and we’ll look at the answer when we come back) do you have any idea how many microbes we lost to this?
We’ll come back and get the answer from Dr. Blaser who is the author of Missing Microbes . You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser. He’s the author of Missing Microbes . Before the break, I asked him if he knows how many microbes we’ve lost.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yeah. Thank you. We can only estimate, but there was a very nice study that was published about two years ago now in Nature comparing the microbiomes of healthy people in the United States, Africans and Malawi and Amerindians in Venezuela. This is led out of Jeff Gordon’s lab at Washington University. Gloria Dominguez and Rob Knight participated in this study.
And what they found is they took a census of how many species were present in the gut, really a fecal specimen from healthy people. In Africa, it was on average about 1400 species. In the Amerindians, it was about 1600 species. And the people in the US, it was about 1200 species. So from that estimate, we’ve lost between 15% and 25% of our diversity. A more recent study by Maria Gloria and colleagues suggests that maybe about 35%.
So that’s a lot. That’s something that’s quite measureable. In a sense, this is like the global warming inside of our body. It’s the same kind of thing. Global warming has been happening for some time, but we didn’t wake up to it until it was well on its way. And that seems to me, that that’s what’s happening with our missing microbes.
DEBRA: So I want to make sure that we talk about antibacterials, because things like triclosan is just in everything. I went to buy a pair of scissors at an office supply store, and there was only one out of six or seven options for buying scissors that didn’t have anti-bacterial on the handle of the scissors. Tell us about that.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Antibacterials are everywhere. They have two purposes. One purpose is to protect the scissors so that the scissors will last longer because bacteria and fungi, they cause decay of many things. So it makes some sense.
But part of it is that they’re also in materials that we use to so-called “protect” us. For example, they’re in toothpaste. The problem is that we Americans were exposed to millions or tens of millions of times everyday to these anti-bacterials, which we would predict would have an effect on our microbiome. But nobody has really measured this. We have no idea what the consequence is. But we need to know.
I will note that about two weeks ago, the State of Minnesota banned triclosan. They said you can’t use it in things that go into products for people anymore. That won’t take effect until 2017, but it is a first step. I think we really have to understand what are they doing to us, because they have just crept up.
Another thing we do is we put on all these antibacterial lotions on our hands. We think that we’re protecting ourselves from germs. There are times to use those lotions. When you’re in the hospital, you don’t want the transmission of dangerous antibiotic-resistant germs. During flu season, we don’t want the flu spreading from person to person. Hands are important.
But those two things together represent probably less than 5% of all the times when one could use the hand thing. And the other 95%, we’re just slathering it on by the millions.
My question is, “Are we doing more benefit or are we doing more harm?” By trying to get rid of bad organisms, we may be actually hurting our good organisms, depleting our good organisms that one day we’re going to need.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. We just talked about this before earlier in the show, but I just want to say it again, because I think it’s a really important point. And that is when we’re talking about these microorganisms, they’re not like a system of our own body. They’re like something that is symbiotic with us, yes? Am I understanding this correctly?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, they are symbiotic with us, but you can also think of them in essence like in other organ of our body like a kidney or a liver because they are doing many different kinds of functions for us like our kidneys or our liver. Increasingly, we think of it as an organ, which just gives you a sense of how important we think they are to our health.
DEBRA: My mind is just twisting around trying to comprehend this because I have studied – now this is going to sound strange maybe, but when I was writing my last book Toxic-Free, I realized that I really didn’t know what were the organ systems in my body.
As I started researching, I was finding that they aren’t very well explained and there aren’t books – I mean, I think if you would ask people on the street what are your body systems, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. And yet, we need to be aware of what they are, because toxic chemicals are damaging each one of them.
And I really am seeing how the microbiome of our bodies – I love that word – the microbiome of our bodies, whether it’s an organ or a symbiotic ecosystem of its own that is working hand in hand with our bodies, they are performing functions. And without this microbiome, we wouldn’t be able to live, our bodies wouldn’t live.
And so we do need to consider what are the toxic chemicals, what are the factors that are destroying it since we need it.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: This is why I wrote Missing Microbes . I wanted to explain these ideas to the public, because explaining it to the medical profession – and I speak quite frequently to doctors and scientists trying to get these viewpoints out. I have to say that in general, they’ve been very well-received. But that’s not enough. We really have to change the comprehension of normal people about all these things that we’re doing.
Everybody thinks that antibiotics are free, that antibacterials are good for us. It’s much more complex. And if we can change the dialogue in the doctor’s office so that parents say, “Can we avoid giving antibiotics?” rather than, “My child must get an antibiotic?” we’ll be getting some place. Again, we know that we’re doing so much, much too much in many areas.
DEBRA: If somebody’s listening to this and they’re saying, “What can I do to maybe restore some of my microbes?”, what would you tell them?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: I say the first thing is to prevent further damage, prevent more decline of your microbes. The restoration is going to be more complicated. I don’t know that we have the state of science today to do that.
I’m hopeful. That’s what we work on in the lab, come up with the real probiotics that we’re going to be using in the future to restore those missing organisms. We have several candidates that we’re working on in the lab that we think that we’re going to be giving especially to kids.
For adults, it’s more complicated. We’re mostly concerned about how kids develop because so many of the important diseases, their roots are in childhood. If we can catch the root, then we can prevent a lot of diseases.
We know obesity begins in the early years of life. So somebody may become obese when they’re 25 or 35 or 45, but there’s a lot of evidence that the first five years of life are the critical time for when that’s developing.
DEBRA: This is so interesting to me, because for me weight has been an issue in my body my entire life. And it’s not about what I eat or what I don’t eat or how much exercise I get. I can do all those things and my body still doesn’t lose weight.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: We’ve known for 50 years that how your body forms in the first few years of life will determine a great deal about a person’s ways.
DEBRA: This is actually such a relief to me. So we’ve only got about two minutes left. So is there anything you’d like to say in closing?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: There’s so much I’d like to say…
DEBRA: Another five hours…
DR. MARTIN BLASER: I want to come back to the tremendous use of antibiotics on the farm because as a result of that, antibiotics are getting into our food, the meat, milk. In some communities, antibiotics are in the drinking water because the water intake is downstream of the ethylene from industrial farms.
Millions of people are getting exposed to trace levels of antibiotics. What are the consequences? We don’t know. We need to know. And probably we need to stop it because all these antibiotics we use on the farm ultimately are affecting our human ecology. That could be another thing that is causing the depletion of our diversity.
And we need that diversity, because the good guys help protect us against invaders. They’re our coastguards. If we deplete them, we become susceptible. And I discussed that in a chapter of Missing Microbes , that I call Antibiotic Winter. It’s a very bleak thing, but we need to prepare. Otherwise, we’re going to be in trouble.
DEBRA: Wow! I need to say something, because I can’t have dead air time.
Listening to everything that you’re saying, I understand the magnitude of what you’re talking about because I could say everything that you’re saying about all the toxic chemicals that I’ve researched over the past 30 years where there are these fundamental things that underlie everything. One of them is what you’re talking about, about losing our microbiome.
Another thing is all these toxic chemicals that are destroying every one of our body systems. It all underlies everything.
Anyway, I’ve only got about 10 seconds. So I’m just going to say thank you so much, Dr. Blaser. His book is Missing Microbes . You can go to his website at MartinBlaser.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to this show again, listen to the other shows, find out what’s coming up. Be well.
