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Meet antivitamins. They may replace your antibiotics one day
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Antivitamins
- As we are moving past the antibiotic era due to rapid bacterial resistance, we need a new class of drugs to treat bacterial infections.
- Antivitamins aren’t as well known as antibiotics, but were identified way back in 1930 by Sir Edward Mellenby, and were called ‘toxamins’.
- Antivitamins disrupt the vitamins in a cell from functioning.
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Bacterial Cell Killers
Antivitamins are produced naturally as a way for a bacterial cell to kill another bacterial cell. The complex and important procedure is done in a seemingly hidden and mysterious way, with just one atom interrupting a complex chain of protons.
New research indicates that there is no harm to humans, and antivitamins can be configured to target pathogens without any side effects.
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Antibiotic resistance
Antibiotics may lose their ability to treat bacterial infections.
Scientists have been warning us about the alarming rise in drug-resistant bacteria, but it can be curbed.
Penicillin
- Penicillin was the first widely-used antibiotic. It was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist.
- He noticed that the staph cells he'd been studying in a petri dish had died, and an unusual mold was growing in it.
- The mould was purified and tested in 1940, and later mass-produced.
- By 1943, the US was supplying all the Allied forces with this miracle drug, which gave them an advantage in treating injuries.
Existing antibiotics found in the dirt
- An agriculture student-turned-microbiologist, Selman Waksman, tested 10,000 soil samples over the years.
- In 1943, he identified streptomycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.
- Drug companies caught on to it, and commissioned pilots, explorers, and foreign correspondents sent back soil samples as they traveled, collecting dozens of new antibiotics.
- By 1970, researchers found themselves discovering the same molecules over and over.
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False Remedies
Much like a hundred years ago when Spanish Flu killed millions, questionable medicinal concoctions and folk remedies have surfaced across the world, claiming to boost the immune system.
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Immunity-Boosting Is A Myth
Pills, superfoods, and other wellness habits do not boost our immunity as the 'symptoms' which we get when infected are in fact measures taken by our immune system to respond to the foreign pathogen.
Many allergies that people have are a misguided response from the immune system that treat harmless foreign bodies as harmful pathogens.
The Symptomatic Treatment
While over-the-counter medicines provide us with a so-called ‘relief’ by suppressing our fever, runny nose and other ‘symptoms’, these are in fact necessary for the body to get well. The symptoms we want to be stopped are not our enemy:
- The mucus is helping flush out the pathogen.
- The fever(heat) makes the body impalpable for it to survive and replicate.
- The body pain is actually the inflammatory chemicals in your veins, guiding the immune cells like an air traffic controller.
- The brain is provided with a signal to slow down and let the body recover.
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Western vs. Mediterranean diet
Western diet, typically high in animal fat and protein and low in fibre, increases the risk of cancer. The Mediterranean diet is high in fibre and low in red meat and has be...
Probiotics
There has been a lot of hype around the health benefits of prebiotics and probiotics in recent years, but while they're increasingly used in treatments including inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, several reviews suggest there needs to be further research on which strains and dosages are effective. Recent studies have found some people are even immune to probiotics.
Gut microbiota
Gut microbiota has a major role to play in the health and function of the GI tract, with evidence that conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) often coincide with altered microbiota. But it also plays a much wider role in our health, and this is largely determined in the first few years of life.