When Antibiotics Fail

When Antibiotics Fail examines the current impacts of AMR on our healthcare system, projects the future impact on Canada’s GDP, and looks at how widespread resistance will influence the day-to-day lives of Canadians. The report examines these issues through a One Health lens, recognizing the interconnected nature of AMR, from healthcare settings to the environment to the agriculture sector. It is the most comprehensive report to date on the economic impact of AMR in Canada.

Explains how superbugs came to be, what scientists are doing to fight them, and how you can protect yourself against these microscopic menaces.

When Antibiotics Fail documents the problem noticed in the mid-eighties of the over-reliance of the medical establishment on antibiotics. Biologist and toxicologist Mark Lappe was among the first medical professionals to sound an alarm aabout the effects of ignoring the natural defenses of the immune system and our tendency to substitute the shot-gun use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. This book describes this tendency for busy physicians to fall into inappropriate use of antibiotics. Lappe explains how antibiotics work, why resistance develops, and what we can do to control bacteria and reactivate the body's own natural defenses.

WHY RIFE MACHINES? Lyme Disease is caused by Borrelia Burgdorferi, a spirochete bacteria similar to the bacteria that causes Syphilis . Lyme Disease is known as the “Great Imitator” – It can masquerade as Attention Deficit Disorder , Chronic Fatigue Syndrome , Fibromyalgia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder , Alzheimer's Disease , Schizophrenia , Depression , Multiple Sclerosis , arthritis , heart conditions, and more. The July, 2004 issue of Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients indicates that Lyme Disease is thought to be the fastest spreading infectious disease in the world, with more than 200,000 new cases per year in the United States alone. Lyme Disease tests are notoriously inaccurate, leading to rampant under-diagnosis of the disease (See Appendix A ). But even the people who are lucky enough to receive an accurate diagnosis do not always respond to antibiotic therapy. Aggressive antibiotic therapy, applied by a Lyme Literate Medical Doctor (LLMD), sometimes fails to provide a cure. Many patients take antibiotics for years, often in combinations of two or three drugs simultaneously – yet in some cases the infection becomes chronic anyway, and numerous Lyme Disease sufferers end up staying sick, losing their jobs, getting dropped by insurance companies, going broke, and losing hope. These monumentally discouraging obstacles facing Lyme Disease sufferers have led many of them to explore the rife machine treatment option, a promising electromagnetic therapy which often works after antibiotics fail.

The resistance topic is timely given current events. The emergence of mysterious new diseases, such as SARS, and the looming threat of bioterrorist attacks remind us of how vulnerable we can be to infectious agents. With advances in medical technologies, we have tamed many former microbial foes, yet with few new antimicrobial agents and vaccines in the pipeline, and rapidly increasing drug resistance among infectious microbes, we teeter on the brink of loosing the upperhand in our ongoing struggle against these foes, old and new. The Resistance Phenomenon in Microbes and Infectious Disease Vectors examines our understanding of the relationships among microbes, disease vectors, and human hosts, and explores possible new strategies for meeting the challenge of resistance.

Antibiotics are powerful drugs that can prevent and treat infections, but they are becoming less effective as a result of drug resistance. Resistance develops because the bacteria that antibiotics target can evolve ways to defend themselves against these drugs. When antibiotics fail, there is very little else to prevent an infection from spreading. Unnecessary use of antibiotics in both humans and animals accelerates the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria, with potentially catastrophic personal and global consequences. Our best defenses against infectious disease could cease to work, surgical procedures would become deadly, and we might return to a world where even small cuts are life-threatening. The problem of drug resistance already kills over one million people across the world every year and has huge economic costs. Without action, this problem will become significantly worse. Following from their work on the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O’Neill outline the major systematic failures that have led to this growing crisis. They also provide a set of solutions to tackle these global issues that governments, industry, and public health specialists can adopt. In addition to personal behavioral modifications, such as better handwashing regimens, Superbugs argues for mounting an offense against this threat through agricultural policy changes, an industrial research stimulus, and other broad-scale economic and social incentives.