At some point during your education, you’ve probably heard of the buzzword “biodiversity”. It emphasises on the importance of having organisms to play different roles in our ecosystem, as a way to ensure balance, which keeps the environment inhabitable and rich in resources.
Although it is a concept mostly related to environment conservation, it extends into the realm of human biology. You guessed it — those microorganisms that stick to our skin, walls of intestines, and so on.
If eukaryotic cells can use mitochondria to their own advantage, why can’t we do something similar? We mainly need them to break down nutrients and boost our immunity against certain diseases. For example, staphylococcus epidermidis – the most common bacterial colony on our skin helps to prevent skin infection on wounds through competing with harmful bacteria that has newly entered the surface of the wound. We also need to recognise that without interference from other colonies, it can overpopulate and become harmful.
Antibiotics are medication for battling against a target microorganism which is assumed to cause the disease. They can also be artificially synthesised. Ever since antibiotics became widely available, trickier problems began to emerge, such as higher rates of asthma, irritable bowel syndrome and obesity. These non-infectious diseases are observed in infants receiving antibiotic treatment during pregnancy.
Martin J Blaser , famous for his h. pylori research, argued that antibiotics disrupt the bacterial ecosystem that has been adapted to serve our immune function. He discovered something paradoxical about h. pylori as a cause of cancer ; while h. pylori can cause inflammation, but the lack of it does the same , since a reasonable dosage does prevent other bacteria from causing damage. Which puts a toll on the immune system’s ability to respond to external disturbances.
So perhaps, medications like antibiotics could never be a one-size fits all solution. To restore healthy microbiota, research has been conducted on targeted therapies, such as the use of probiotics, and even a fecal transplant. It is also important to minimize the prescription of antibiotics , and just make antibiotics more targeted towards specific intruder bacteria but not existing ones.
Comments