Last Days of the Wonder Drugs

This very approach is being used in animal husbandry. In March the FDA approved a spray containing 29 types of bacteria isolated from the guts of mature chickens. These are the bugs that chicks would normally receive from their mothers but that hatchery-born chicks lack. Once sprayed with the mix, the chicks ingest the bacteria while preening themselves.

So far the results have been promising (and in Japan, where the spray has been available for more than a year, it has been highly successful). Not only does the spray of good bugs protect the chicks from pathogenic bacteria--in particular Salmonella--simply by occupying the niches where the bad bugs would otherwise lodge, but it discourages antibiotic use. Because why would anyone want to give these animals antibiotics that would kill off the very bugs that are protecting them?

Levy considers this approach a model of what can be done in humans. But the list of changes that must accompany such an approach is daunting: education and more accurate diagnoses leading to fewer, and more appropriate, prescriptions of antibiotics; restrained use of antibiotics in animal husbandry and agriculture; reduced use of antibacterials in household disinfectants. And all this not only in the United States but in countries worldwide, some of which are even more profligate with antibiotics.

"There's a lot of ingrained social behavior associated with antibiotic use," observes Levin. To wit, Shoemaker's unhappy encounter and Levin's own experience at the day-care center. "The majority of the kids were on antibiotics during the six months we did the study. At least one kid was on five different antibiotics. Another was on triple antibiotic therapy--prophylactically! She wasn't even sick." He shrugs his shoulders. "And the parents of these kids were from Emory and the CDC. So it wasn't exactly an unenlightened group. How are you going to change most people's minds if you can't change theirs?"

And what if, after all is said and done, prudent use can be implemented--what if it just doesn't make a difference? The years to come may be grim, indeed, seared by a hard reality the more fortunate parts of the world have not had to face for the last half-century. The bugs are reminding us who's boss.

PETER RADETSKY ("Last Days of the Wonder Drugs," page 76) is a contributing editor of DISCOVER and teaches science writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His latest book, Allergic to the 20th Century, about environmental illnesses, was published in July by Little, Brown and Company.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Discover Media LLC
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning