Antibiotic Resistance to Flu, Colds, Viruses, and Bacterial
Infections
Did you know that over 2 million people per year contract an infection while they are in the hospital and
90,000 die from infections they contracted while in the hospital?
Makes you wonder just how safe is the hospital.
Recently there was an article in the AARP magazine that could sent cold chills up the spine. We had always
known there was a high degree of risk, when going into the hospital, of contracting an infection you didn’t
have when you got there. But we had no idea how high the risk really was. According to this article, hospital
infections are sited as the nation’s sixth-leading cause of death. Shocking. All the numbers were shocking,
from the 2 million people per year that get an infection while in the hospital to the 90,000 per year who
die of them.
It just makes good sense to boost your immune system in every way possible before checking into the hospital.
We gave our mother a dose of the product we are endorsing on this page, just a few weeks before she had to
go into the hospital for heart surgery. We were so glad she had the antidote in her system because almost
everyone we know who has gone into a hospital for surgery has contracted a staff infection. Mom didn’t. Of
course, we can’t prove the antidote was the reason but it must have helped.
Antibiotic Resistance – What it is and Why You Should Be Concerned
The triumph of antibiotics over disease-causing bacteria is one of modern medicine’s greatest success stories.
Since these drugs first became widely used in the World War II era, they have saved countless lives and blunted
serious complications of many feared diseases and infections. After more than 50 years of widespread use,
however, many antibiotics don’t pack the same punch they once did.
Over time, some bacteria have developed ways to outwit the effects of antibiotics. Widespread use of antibiotics
is thought to have spurred evolutionary changes in bacteria that allow them to survive these powerful drugs.
While antibiotic resistance benefits the microbes, it presents humans with two big problems: it makes it
more difficult to purge infections from the body; and it heightens the risk of acquiring infections in a
hospital.
Diseases such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and childhood ear infections are now more difficult to
treat than they were decades ago. Drug resistance is an especially difficult problem for hospitals because
they harbor critically ill patients who are more vulnerable to infections than the general population and
therefore require more antibiotics.
What is Tamiflu?
Tamiflu is one type of medicine that doctors feel may be effective against the avian bird flu. Things to remember
about Tamiflu: It must be administered within 48 hours of onset of symptoms. It may not be available, should
a pandemic occur. It is expensive.
Antibiotics Statistics
Strains of S. aureus resistant to methicillin are endemic in hospitals and are increasing in non-hospital
settings such as locker rooms. Since September 2000, outbreaks of methicillin-resistant S. aureus infections
have been reported among high school football players and wrestlers in California, Indiana, and Pennsylvania,
according to the CDC.
The first S. aureus infections resistant to vancomycin emerged in the United States in 2002, presenting physicians
and patients with a serious problem. In July 2002, the CDC reported that a Michigan patient with diabetes,
vascular disease, and chronic kidney failure had developed the first S. aureus infection completely resistant
to vancomycin. A similar case was reported in Pennsylvania in September 2002.
Increasing reliance on vancomycin has led to the emergence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci infections.
Prior to 1989, no U.S. hospital had reported any vancomycin resistant enterococci, but over the next decade,
such microbes have become common in U.S. hospitals, according to CDC.
A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the incidence of blood and tissue infections
known as sepsis almost tripled from 1979 to 2000.
