The Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF) reports that the world is becoming dependent on a few big suppliers for a fragile antibiotic supply, causing shortages in hospitals around the world. Tight supply for intensive care antibiotics like piperacillin-tazobactam has put many lives at risk.
Germany, Brazil and 37 other countries now face shortages of benzathine penicillin G, which is used to prevent the transmission of syphilis from mother to child. The antibiotics that currently work the best are becoming scarce and medical professionals have to depend on generic, less effective antibiotics to treat patients. Many of these treatments are backfiring because bacteria have mutated and can now outsmart these antibiotics.
“Things are getting worse because the market is not fixing the problem, despite the expansion in the need for such specialist antibiotics,” said AMF Executive Director Jayasree Iyer.
Medical systems should be working with herbalists to extract and formulate antimicrobial medicines that come directly from plants. Pharmacies should be stockpiling extracts of oregano, basil, rosemary, tea tree, clove and lavender, just a few species of plants that contain effective antimicrobial substances.
Plant extracts, raw honey, apple cider vinegar and colloidal silver should be part of a more comprehensive, holistic infection treatment protocol, one that can prevent infections, restore immune system responses, fortify depleted microbiomes, and even treat acute infections.
Pharmaceutical antibiotics are failing
Bacterial infections are becoming tougher to treat because the population is maladapted at the microbial level, their immune systems sterilized and weak. Antibiotics, which target specific cellular functions of all bacteria, have caused infectious bacteria to mutate in order to survive.
An antibiotic like penicillin, which destroys bacteria’s ability to build a cell wall, hinders the good protective species of bacteria along with the infectious ones. Over time, this creates a void in the microbiome of the human host and a vacuum is created, allowing infectious bacteria to take advantage of the depleted conditions to further colonize them.
An antibiotic like Erythromycin blocks bacterial ribosomes and prevents them from building proteins. As the bacteria within a person lose the ability to build proteins, they die off. This too can create a vacuum, weakening the protective bacteria species in the gut and causing bacteria to take on resistant traits in order to survive in the human host. Infectious bacteria adapt to these conditions. The antibiotics that once fought off infections no longer work against the rapidly evolving bacteria.
Today researchers identify bacterial resistance in the form of antibiotic inactivation, target modification, altered permeability, and “bypass” of metabolic pathway. Scientists estimate that 70 percent of infectious bacteria are now resistant to one or more of the antibiotics that are used to treat them.
Plant-based antimicrobials take a different approach, preventing bacterial mutations
Plants have been protecting themselves for millennia, synthesizing their own complex antimicrobial compounds to protect their species from decay. An extract of oregano contains carvacrol and rosmarinic acid, two powerful antimicrobials that break down infectious bacteria quickly. Oregano is known for dismantling infections of the throat, urinary tract and gastrointestinal tract, and has proved effective at treating strep throat, Klebsiella oxytoca, and Klebsiella pneumonia.
Raw honey contains the versatile antimicrobial properties of multiple plants, a collection of nectar from various flowering herbs and wildflowers. The prebiotic properties of honey give the commensal bacteria species in the human gut the fortitude they need to keep infections at bay. Raw honey is great on skin wounds and burns, and is effective for treating life-threatening methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
Manuka honey is a special kind of nectar produced by bees in New Zealand. These bees specifically forage on the nectar of Leptospermum Scoparium, or New Zealand’s Manuka bush. This variety of honey is especially effective at treating infections because it contains methylglyoxal, which incites multi-system failure in infectious bacteria.
Plant-based antimicrobials do not target the specific genes or proteins of all bacteria and therefore do not incite resistant traits. Plant-based antimicrobials work in conjunction with the plant’s antioxidant, mineral and vitamin content to strengthen the body’s immune response and preserve the protective microbes that help assimilate these phytonutrients.
For more on the healing properties of plants, visit Herbs.News.
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