Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Stephen Harrod Buhner Page A

and 50,000 pounds of tetracycline and streptomycin are sprayed on fruit trees every year (1 pound of tetracycline will treat 450 people). This kills not only bacteria on the plants but all susceptible bacteria in the soil itself with cascading effects on soil integrity and health. While spraying allows potent doses of streptomycin to directly enter the ecosystem, other antibiotics, like oxytetracycline, are sometimes injected, much as they are with people, directly into larger plants’ trunks and roots. Not surprisingly, resistant pathogenic plant bacteria have been found in soil and plant communities wherever such practices occur. The bacterial transposon developed by leaf blight during resistance acquisition has been found in seven wild bacterial species in the soil. All these bacteria now have resistance to the streptomycin normally produced by the soil fungi in the region. This same dynamic has also been found occurring in the soil under wheat plants. The application or spread of antibiotic effluents in the environment is promoting resistance impacts in natural soil communities among wild bacteria, thus interfering with the normal balance of the soil biota. Agricultural practices such as liming fields and industrial heavy-metal pollutionhave been found, as well, to increase the density of resistant pathogens in the soil. Researchers have also started to insert bacterial resistance factors directly into the genetic structure of some plants (e.g., sugar beets), and these resistance factors have also been found to move into ecosystem bacteria.
    The immense production of antibacterial substances once found only in minute quantities in the environment—substances produced by soil fungi, bacteria, or plants to protect their territorial integrity—has begun to affect the life cycle of bacteria and thousands of other organisms in the ecosystem and subsequently is affecting the health of the soil and the planet itself.
    We have, as Mark Lappé remarked in
The End of Antibiotics
, “let our profligate use of antibiotics reshape the evolution of the microbial world and wrest any hope of safe management from us.”
Bacterial Partners
    Bacteria are not our enemies, as some scientists have postulated, nor a dangerous life-form bent on sickening mankind, as so many television commercials would have us believe. They are our ancestors and we are very much alike; we both metabolize fats, vitamins, sugars, and proteins. Lynn Margulis comments succinctly, “The more balanced view of microbe as colleague and ancestor remains almost unexpressed. Our culture ignores the hard-won fact that these disease ‘agents,’ these ‘germs,’ also germinated all life. Our ancestors, the germs, were bacteria.” 36 Bacteria are not germs but the germinators—and fabric—of all life on Earth. In declaring war on them, we declared war on the underlying living structure of the planet, on all life-forms we can see, on ourselves.
    One of the few naturally sterile places on Earth is a woman’s womb, and the gestation period prior to birth is the only time any human body is bacteria free. At birth, assuming it is a healthy one, the baby is immediately placed on the mother’s chest near the nipple. As the first movements toward bonding are taking place, the bacteria that live onthe mother’s skin began to colonize her baby’s body. When the infant begins to nurse, the interior of the baby’s intestinal tract is colonized—from the skin around the nipple and the milk itself—and these bacteria are crucially important. Nursing introduces lactobacilli and other bacteria such as
Bifidobacterium bifidus
into the intestinal tract of newborns. This has significant effects on their health.
Lactobacillus acidophilus
bacteria create important vitamins and nutrients such as B 1 , B 2 , B 3 , B 12 , and folic acid in the intestinal tract. They help digest food and they also secrete natural