After Antibiotics: The Seamonster That Could Save Your Life

As argued in my November post http://www.risingher.com/old-dirt-new-tricks/ , I defend the view that bacterial exposure plays a key role in human health, and that it should be encouraged as much as possible, from as early an age as possible. My defense rests largely on irony: poor health outcomes (often fatalities) have exponentially increased in proportion to contemporary ‘cleanliness’. In fact, from over-sanitation of external elements to over-prescription of internal anti-microbials, we have failed miserably at understanding and utilizing the mysterious microbiological universe, and we’re about to pay for it. According to Medical Daily, antibiotic resistance will kill 10 million a year by 2050. That’s a lot of people close to home when you correct for the countries that aren’t as antibiotic-heavy as we are in the UK. In short, what I’m trying to say, in the nicest possible way, is that there’s a reasonable chance that you or your children will be one of those people. What I’m definitely not trying to say, is that any of you should be. So what the hell am I trying to say? Well, throughout the rest of this post I want to introduce you to something called ‘bacteriophage therapy,’ which is currently a taboo here in the West, but which might just end up saving you or someone close to you. However, before I do, we’ll need to go back in time.


“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”