Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes (TED Books) by Rob Knight

Author:Rob Knight
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED
Published: 2015-04-06T14:00:00+00:00

6 Antibiotics

With everything we’re learning about the essential, complicated roles that microbes play in almost every part of our lives, we have to ask ourselves: Is it wise to use antibiotics as frequently as we do?

Amanda and I took our daughter to her first doctor’s appointment when she was just a few days old. The pediatrician asked us a question with all the care and delicacy of a zoo dentist worried that the lion she’s treating might be insufficiently anesthetized. “So,” she said, “there are a lot of different opinions about vaccines. How are we feeling about them?”

Amanda and I looked at each other and said, “We would like all the vaccines on the CDC schedule, thank you very much.” The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes a recommended schedule of childhood immunizations.

I don’t blame our pediatrician. She was just being sensitive to the (insane) concerns of the community from which she draws her patients. It’s exasperating to me how much people worry about vaccines and how little they worry about antibiotics.

Consider what happened when our daughter was born. Right before Amanda underwent an unplanned cesarean, she was given antibiotics. And minutes after our daughter’s birth, doctors put antibiotic drops in her eyes. No one asked—they just did it. This is a standard treatment designed to guard against the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea, which can cause conjunctivitis in infants.1 We were pretty sure we didn’t have gonorrhea. But the point is, we didn’t find out until later about the antibiotics, which have become so ubiquitous that their use is not always disclosed before they are administered. People worry about vaccines, even though almost all concerns about vaccines are scientifically unfounded or have been outright disproved. For instance, reports that certain vaccines cause autism have been comprehensively disproven, the journal paper that claimed the association has been retracted, and the author barred from practicing medicine in his native England.2 Of course, vaccines do have risks, but these risks are well documented and minuscule: typically one in a million for severe reactions.3

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.