Ways to kill antibiotic resistant bacteria....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 4-8-2014

Before modern antibiotics, life was a very chaotic affair in many ways because people their relatives cared about would die suddenly of an unexpected infection or someone holding a key leadership position would die suddenly from an infection.

Surgery existed but had a very high death rate.

And, people spent a surprising amount of time going to funerals every year.

(My wife is a Civil War buff and reads many books about that time and told me this was what life was like then and it affected the people who made the history.)

Because of large scale unregulated use of antibiotics in developing countries and factory farms in the United States and some overuse as a placebo for conditions antibiotics are NOT needed to treat and people taking antibiotics until they feel better but haven’t yet killed all the bacteria, many serious bacterial infections are now more and more caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria.

This post has two parts:

1. Is a promising topical solution for wounds.

2.  Is my idea of combining methods found effective killing many of the antibiotic bacteria first and then empowering your immune system to kill the rest and bypassing the protective methods unharmed bacteria use to prevent this.

1.  Many systemic bacterial infections begin as infections in the skin.  So, if you get a bacterial infection in a wound or on your skin, if you kill off the bacteria there, even if it would kill you if it got inside you, it never will get there.

So, the first two things to do are to gently wash the wound with soapy water to remove any dirt or bacteria you can as soon as possible. And, then cover the wound with a bandage that prevents new bacteria from getting in – which also has been tested to speed healing.

But, what if you develop an infection? What if this happens before the wound had fully healed over?

It could be a harmful and very antibiotic resistant one.

About 3 weeks ago I got an email that had evidence that unadulterated honey could and did kill antibiotic resistant bacteria by itself when applied topically.  Even better, by combining honey with a topical antibiotic, the kill rate was even more complete.

To avoid excess sugar intake you want to eat honey only VERY sparingly.  But it may make sense to have some unadulterated honey on hand.  (Processed honey with high fructose corn syrup added is likely not to work well. Health food stores and some upscale grocery stores and Whole Foods Market carry honeys that likely work for this purpose.)

Here’s the information from that email which I got from Newsmax:

Honey Fights Drug-Resistant Superbugs....   Monday, 17 Mar 2014  in Newsmax email

.Research, presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas then, shows topical honey can help fight infections including antibiotic resistant infections.

The special value of honey lies in its ability to fight infection on multiple levels, making it far more difficult for bacteria to develop resistance.

Honey has:

 hydrogen peroxide,

acidity,

osmotic effect,

high sugar concentrations,

and polyphenols

Delivered topically, many of these properties actively kill bacteria. 

It's like a double check or triple check in chess.  Bacteria may be able to overcome any one of these but when it gears up to fight the one it perceives first or overcomes best, one that it didn't cover or is more susceptible to does it in.

The lead researcher was Susan M. Meschwitz from Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I.

The osmotic effect of honey draws water from the bacterial cells, dehydrating and killing them.

Other studies have also shown that honey inhibits the formation of biofilms, the slimy disease-causing bacterial sheets that are notoriously resistant to drugs, she said.

Biofilms are one method of resistance that acts like a shield and even if you kill the bacteria at one point on the surface, you don't get enough access to all of them to kill them all which allows for reinfection &/or bacterial resistant bacteria to survive.

Those two effects, the osmotic effect and the prevention of biofilms, seem to be most valuable in killing bacteria of the things listed. 

The hydrogen peroxide listed must be in very low concentrations or we couldn’t eat honey.  But there may be studies showing there is enough to harm or slow down bacteria.

These properties make sense since the bees that depend on the honey that made honey that grew bacteria easily died off.  So honey’s anti-bacterial properties may have evolved to a degree that kept it in edible condition for the bees when they used it later.

Honey may also make the bacteria more susceptible to conventional antibiotics for the same reasons. So using the honey AND a topical antibiotic may be far more effective than either alone.

Honey also has healthful polyphenols, antioxidants, including caffeic acid, p-coumaric acid and ellagic acid, and also many flavonoids. Even if these don’t harm the bacteria they do help heal you.  And, to the extent bacteria harm you by causing oxidation, these antioxidants are also protective.

And, the faster you heal, the less entry the bacteria has to the rest of you.

"Several studies have demonstrated a correlation between the non-peroxide antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of honey and the presence of honey phenolics," she added.

A large number of laboratory and limited clinical studies have confirmed the broad-spectrum antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral properties of honey, according to researcher Meschwitz.

2.  My idea of combining methods found effective killing many of the antibiotic bacteria first and then empowering your immune system to kill the rest and bypassing the protective methods unharmed bacteria use to prevent this.

a) There are three kinds of best practices in hospitals that sharply reduce the rate of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the hospitals.

Start if you possibly can with a hospital that uses all three and has that information on its website and includes evidence they use each of the three.

First, they always use checklists to ensure everyone in the room in operations and procedures washes their hands and does it every single time without fail and to keep the wound clean and re-covered promptly.

Second, they have protocols that avoid unneeded and borderline use of antibiotics and they follow them well.  (This by itself was found to cut the amount of antibiotic resistant bacteria by more than two to one.)

Third, they follow the state of the art in effective ways to avoid spreading the bacteria that show up, particularly the antibiotic resistant ones, and use checklists every time to ensure they always use these methods.

b)  There are some methods that kill bacteria whether the bacteria are antibiotic resistant or not. 

My hope is that they will all be tested and the ones that work are used early when there is systemic infection or infection inside your digestive tract.  This will prevent many patient deaths directly.  But even better, by removing those bacteria quickly from the hospital, it will reduce their spread and the costs to contain them.

Intravenous high dose vitamin C is very safe and acts like or creates hydrogen peroxide in your blood which will kill many bacteria.

I did see a study on Medical News Today showing this DID work on antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The drug companies can’t make money on this but it is tested to work.  And there are doctors skilled in its use.  If you get a systemic infection with an antibiotic resistant bacteria and can arrange to have this treatment early on, it may be life saving.

I don’t know if this has been tested in combination with antibiotics; but that may also work well since the bacteria that survive the vitamin C may be killed by the antibiotics and the ones that work to overcome the antibiotics may die from the vitamin C.

I did see that this idea WAS tested to be successful by using intravenous silver and the safer and older antibiotic drugs that the bacteria was quite resistant to otherwise.

But it may be that using enough silver to be most effective may be undesirable due to cosmetic effects and some real damage to some systems in the body by accumulated silver.

If a patient is seriously ill and dying, this may make sense as time is short.

But there is a method that might work to get this effect and avoid overloading the body with silver.

One successful method to overcome cancer removed the cancer from the patient and then killed all its cells AND then added the killed cells back into the patient and boosted their immune system.  The immune system of the patients thus treated which had not adequately seen the cancer cells as invaders to kill off and remove not only removed these dead cancer cells, they removed all the live ones remaining too.

If you killed many of the bacteria first with the vitamin C or vitamin C plus antibiotic (possibly by then using a lower dose silver and antibiotic treatment in the patient first also) and then removed some of the surviving bacteria and used a very high silver treatment plus antibiotics to kill them outside the body and then sent the killed bacteria back while boosting the immune system, this three part attack may test to be very effective.

Also, it’s known that boosting vitamin D3 intake to ensure blood levels of 60 or more both empowers your immune system to kill invaders much more effectively AND to boost regulatory T cells enough to avoid autoimmune problems.

Doing that vitamin D3 step early in the process right away, and then boosting the patient’s temperature to about 103 degrees after the first two steps might sharply boost the kill rate in the remaining bacteria since this is a very powerful immune system booster.

(Note that for this effect, taking high doses of vitamin C by mouth does NOT kill bacteria or cancer cells the way the higher dose intravenous vitamin C does.)