Related Questions
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- Can/do superbugs attack other bugs?
- do you feel it is better to use man made drugs or herbal remedy to cure superbugs?
By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
That’s a great question as always potatosteph. Whilst ideally it is better for us to use our own immune system to fight off bacterial infections, bacteria (and virii too but we dont have many drugs to use on them) are really good at changing their DNA so they can evade our immune system.
But you have hit the nail on the head as to why we are having problems with superbugs today. When someone would come and see the doctor with an infection, doctors would prescribe antibiotics without waiting to see if the patient could fight it off on their own. This i think is partly because of how hard it is to get in to see a doctor. both patient and doctor know it’s very hard to ask a patient to come back in three days time if they aren’t better because the bacteria is evading their immune system.
Now doctors are being told to do this, and more are doing it (i had a great doctor who would write the prescription knowing that i of all people would not take the drugs unless i was still sick in a few days) but scientists are worried it is happening too late.
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Potatosteph let me congratulate you for coming up with a such a good question. I noted you down to my top 5 with this question.
Ok, I couldn’t agree with you more in saying using our natural immune system would be better to fight against various diseases. What you are suggesting here is a mechanism which we frequently see in other organisms in nature. However there is a little problem which prevents us from doing the same. We have ethical values, moral and conscience… In order to fight against bacteria using our natural immune system, we have to let the nature to select the best among us so that after several rounds of generation, our offsprings would be able to resist against many diseases which seems to be a problem that we cannot solve today. Then the bacteria would possibly call us “super-humans” like we call them “super-bugs” now. However, would you like to let your mother or father die if they develop diabetes type 2 due to the genes they inherited from your grandparents? Nobody would let their loved ones go… Therefore it has been long time since we are not a part of the nature. In order words, we isolated ourselves from natural ways so long ago that natural selection doesn’t apply on us and moreover it is too late to go back. That’s why we have to rely on man-made drugs to continue our fight against bacteria. Oh by the way, we are just lucky that bacteria don’t have any malicious intention like “wiping out” humans from their world. They don’t have human sanitizers which kills up to 99.99% of humans. Today less than 1% among all the bacteria may pose a health risk for us and they don’t do it intentionally. Otherwise believe me, if bacteria wanted to destroy us, we wouldn’t stand a chance against them.
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I completely agree with Miranda and Yagiz. It would be better if we let our own immune systems fight off the infection.
Another problem which hasn’t been mentioned yet is that a lot of people don’t finish their prescriptions. A lot of people take antibiotics until they feel better and throw away the rest. Even when we start to feel better there is still a small population of bacteria left which are the ones most resistance to the antibiotics. If this population starts increasing, taking antibiotics the next time around might not help as as much because the ones which are left are the ones most resistant to the drugs. This increases the superbug population.
Sometimes our own system has a lot of trouble fighting off the bugs and we do need the help of medication, but as I said at the start, I agree that most of the time we should give our immune systems a go first. It is what they are there for!
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