Well we’re at that time of year again…the flu season is upon us. Everyone is running out to get their flu shots. You don’t have to go to your family doctor anymore to get them either. You can get them at drug stores, and a variety of other places that now offer vaccines against the flu.
What is the flu exactly anyway?
Many people, myself included, always thought that we just had a bad cold when in actuality we had the flu. The reason being, is that the flu has many of the same symptoms as the common cold. It’s an infection of the upper respiratory tract, and it is highly contagious. It attacks the nose, throat, and lungs.
After a person has been exposed to the influenza virus, it usually only takes one to three days before the symptoms start to show themselves. The one big difference between a cold and the flu is that the symptoms are much more severe.
Along with the sneezing and congestion, that comes with the common cold, the flu will give you, fever, headache, dry cough, sore throat, runny stuffy nose, body aches, nausea, and extreme fatigue. Usually a person will be sick for about 7 to 10 days, but some more severe cases can be longer and require hospitalization. These more severe cases are usually found in the elderly and the very young children.
With all our modern advances in the medical field, the influenza virus has almost been as minor to us as the common cold, but that has not always been the case. A virus will invade your body and attach itself to your cells, takeover and start mutating and spreading. Even though we come up with vaccines and temporarily kill the virus and stop it from spreading, we can never totally eradicate it from existence.
A virus can live in a dormant state for a very long period of time until it finds a host cell, where it will attach itself too, mutate and start self replicating. When that happens It now becomes a living organism and ready to take over.
The Influenza of 1918
World War1 was coming to a close and troops were coming home, but they brought something with them. All around the globe people were coming down with what many believed was just a common cold…it was something much worse than just a common cold, it was the influenza virus, and it had found a host cell and it was ready to make its move.
Within just two years one fifth of the world’s population was infected with the flu virus. Unlike most influenza, that attack the elderly and the very young, this strain of virus was attacking people between the ages of 20 and 40 years of age. 28% of all Americans had the virus. Before it was all over, an estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza. Of all the US solders that died during World War1, half of them died of the influenza virus and not from the wounds of war.
There are many stories of how fast the virus would attack someone and within days they would be dead. Stories of concerned parents who would send their children to live with relatives, and never see them again. As the deadly virus spread around the world, the medical community was at a loss as to what it was and how it could be stopped. Their was now a new war, and this time the enemy could not be seen, and their were no weapons made to fight it.
Between 1348 and 1350, the “bubonic plague” or “Black Death”, had taken the lives of 1.5 million people in England. The whole of society just stopped. Crops couldn’t be plowed and harvested, and other important functions of life, would come to a complete stand still because people were dying at such a rapid rate.
Could this happen today? With all our high-tech and medical knowledge, could this be possible again in our cities and streets? With Halloween here, and kids dressed up as zombies and goblins, is it possible that the “Night of the Living Dead”, could actually become a reality?
There are germs and bacteria all around us, and some of them are good for us. We share this world with them but a virus that comes to life and starts on its rampage of death and destruction, can bring down life as we know it, to an abrupt halt.
Eating healthy, exercise, taking care of our personal hygiene, and keeping our environment clean, are all good habits that we should practice and do, but as I was researching for this article, I realized how very vulnerable and weak we truly are to fight against such a strong and silent killer as the influenza virus.
I always thought it was no big deal. We get the flu, take a shot, get some antibiotics in us, and we are OK. That is totally not true. The virus is always changing and developing new strains to attack our defenses and render our immune systems totally useless. It’s a constant battle to survive. Influenza virus has killed millions of people. It’s a fight we can’t lose.
The Future
In the last three decades we have seen several viral and bacterial
epidemics take place at a time when we would have expected the
eradication of many infectious diseases. Some people say this is due to
the over-use of too-potent antibiotics, which eliminate protective
infecting agents. Others believe it might be the widespread use of
vaccines. There are even conspiracy theorists who believe they may be
the results of terrorist acts or leakage of viral mutants from research
laboratories.
Whatever the cause, globalisation and the increasing availability of
long distance flights is making the global spread of infections far
easier. In the 21st Century we have already identified a number of
infectious organisms that can and will present a major problem to
patients, physicians, health care workers and administrators the world
over. These include:
MRSA
MDR Tuberculosis
VRE Vancomycin-resistant enterococcus
VRSA Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
VISA and GISA (Glycopeptide intermediate resistant
Staphylococcus aureus)
All these have proven to be sensitive to allicin and a sixth – PRSP
Penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumonia – though not yet tested, is
very likely to be.
With MRSA now reported in the ‘healthy community’ (cMRSA
community-acquired methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) the
writing is already on the wall. We need something that can take on the
superbugs. We need to reduce our dependence on pharmaceutical
antibiotics, or at least make them more effective, by reducing the
extent to which they are used. By not doing that, these powerful
microbes will take over. Already infectious disease is a bigger killer
than heart disease or cancer. The species above cannot be treated by
anything the pharmaceutical industry has to offer. Even the latest
antibiotics, yet to reach the market, are unable to kill certain species of
bacteria. We have seen international panic over SARS, Bird Flu,
Clostridium difficile and MRSA spreading. Bad enough and quite
worrying when you realise doctors routinely encounter organisms
such as E. coli, Helicobacter pylori, Tuberculosis, Herpes virus,
Acinetobacter, Cryptosporidium, Campylobacter, Salmonella, Cholera,
Streptococcus Pyogenes flesh-eating bacteria and others that are
becoming multi-drug-resistant. It is estimated the number of bacteria,
virus and fungal pathogens to be found either in or around every
human being is so large as to be virtually infinite. This is why still,
after 70 years of producing pharmaceutical antibiotics, recent surveys
indicate that 90 percent of visits to doctor’s surgeries are infectionrelated.
It is also why more than one million metric tons of antibiotics
have been dispersed into the biosphere in the past 50 years – half for
human use and half for animal use which means that the indigenous
bacteria of all living species are richly populated with resistant bacteria
we cannot get rid of. Is it any wonder that public health physicians are
so worried? Why are we losing the battle?
Recent reports indicate that bacteria may send messages to each
other about resisting antibiotic poisoning (Medicine Today, June 2002).
In fact, bacterial signalling is going on all the time, all over your body,
but especially in your mouth and guts. Finding ways of interfering
with this signalling process is the latest objective of researchers who
are waging the antibiotic arms race. Major results of these bacterial
conversations are bacterial communities! Among the more
extraordinary sights visible through the latest confocal laser scanning
microscopes, which allows objects to be viewed almost in 3D, are what
have been dubbed ‘slime cities’ – armoured defensive communities
where bacteria live and reproduce, safe from antibiotics, your immune
system and other predators. Known technically as biofilms, they are
currently the target of intense research now it is becoming increasingly
clear they are at the root of some of our most intractable conditions.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate 65
percent of human bacterial infections involve biofilms. Not only are
they responsible for tooth decay and gum disease but they also cause
many of the problems associated with cystic fibrosis, ear infections and
infections of the prostate gland and the heart. They cause an estimated
$6 billion a year of expenditure in the USA by causing hard-to-treat
infections around catheters, artificial heart valves and other medical
implants.
Similarly, irrational prescribing results in over-use of the very
agents used to remove these infectious organisms. It is estimated that
every year in the States, 10 million adults seek treatment for acute
bronchitis and most are given antibiotics even though the pathogens
involved in most cases are viruses, which antibiotics aren’t designed to
work on. We tend to think of bacteria as primitive single-cell creatures,
but when they are organised into a biofilm they differentiate,
communicate, cooperate and deploy collective defences against
antibiotics. In short, they behave like a multi-cellular organism.
Bacteria from biofilms were among the first ever to be seen
through a microscope when pioneer Antony van Leeuwenhoek looked
at plaque – a biofilm – scraped from his own teeth in the late 1600’s.
But it wasn’t until the 1970’s that scientists began to appreciate just
how complex these micro slime cities are. Plaque, for instance, is
founded on a base of dense opaque slime about 5 micrometres thick.
Above this, vast colonies of bacteria shaped like mushrooms or cones
rise to between 100 to 200 micrometres. Enclosed within their highly
effective defensive wall of slime live communities of a variety of
bacterial strains. One researcher described them as ‘cities’ permeated
at all levels by a network of channels through which water, bacterial
garbage, nutrients, enzymes, metabolites and oxygen travel to and fro.
The bacteria inside a biofilm, comprising 15 percent bacterial cells and
85 percent slime, are 1000 times less likely to succumb to antibiotics
than bacteria in a free-floating state.
The notion that bacteria can talk to each other was first proposed
more than 30 years ago by scientists studying ‘glow in the dark’
bacteria such as Vibro fischeri, which inhabit ‘light organs’ of certain
squid and marine fish. The bacteria don’t glow as individuals
swimming freely but when enough of them form a group, their
illuminations are switched on. So they must have some way of letting
each other know when enough of them have gathered. It wasn’t until
the 1980’s that researchers identified the chemical they each put out –
AHL (acyl-homoserine lactone). The more of them in one place, the
higher the level of AHL released. Above a certain threshold the
concentration of AHL triggers the luminescence in a mechanism
usually referred to as Quorum Sensing.
Gradually a better understanding of how biofilms fight off
antibiotics is emerging. The bacteria benefit from pooling their effects.
For instance, in a biofilm some bacteria produce an enzyme that
inactivates the antiseptic hydrogen peroxide, but a single bacterium
can’t make enough to save itself. Another factor is that even if an
antibiotic does get through and kills off some bacterial inhabitants, a
substantial number are likely to survive. This is because bacteria exist
in a spectrum of physiological states from rapidly growing to dormant.
Antibiotics usually target some activity such as cell division, and that
means the dormant ones will usually live to fight another day. Dr
Richard Novick found that Staphylococcus aureus can be divided into
four types, each with slightly different signalling molecules. The
molecules used by one type stimulate activity in its own group but
inhibit it in the others – an example of the way bacteria compete with
each other. This particular bacterium is a worry to every healthcare
establishment in the western world. It has developed a number of
strains resistant to all pharmaceutical antibiotics, even Vancomycin, a
toxic parenteral drug usually reserved as a last resort.
Bacteria are sufficiently well organised to find ways of avoiding
the immune system. For instance, in Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that
causes cholera, the same genes involved in regulating quorum sensing
also turn on the toxin production (Proc Nat’l Acad Sci, 5 March 2002).
The value of this strategy is that a few toxic bacteria might alert the
immune system and be rapidly engulfed. By waiting to turn on
toxicity until there are enough of them, they have a better chance of
overwhelming the host’s defences. It has been estimated that 40
percent of proteins in bacterial walls differ in ‘slime city dwellers’ from
those that are ‘free ranging’. The implication is that some of the
proteins identified in cultures and targeted by antibiotics simply aren’t
there in city dwellers. Most of the work on quorum sensing has
concentrated on chemicals which allow members of the same species
to talk to one another. However, while Dr Bonnie Bassler at Princeton
University was working on the luminous bacteria that led to the
finding of quorum sensing, she made the remarkable discovery that
signals from other bacteria could also turn on their lights. It seems that
bacteria have some sort of Esperanto – a common language (Nature, 31
January 2002) – which involves a protein known as A1-2. Exactly what
this system is used for isn’t clear yet. However, among the bacteria
that infect humans, those found to produce A1-2 include Escherichia
coli (food poisoning), Haemophilus influenzae (pneumonia and
meningitis), Helicobacter pylori (peptic ulcers), Yersinia pestis (bubonic
plague) and Staphylococcus aureus (pneumonia, meningitis and toxic
shock syndrome). ALL of these bacteria can be killed
by low concentrations of allicin
Allicin, mother nature’s defender, is an agent that can break up a
biofilm, destroy a wide range of bacterial species, wipe out fungal
infections, boost an under-active immune system, reduce cholesterol
and blood pressure levels, prevent viral infections, kill off parasites,
remove protozoal organisms, vasodilate when necessary, prevent the
release of histamine, and even prevent mosquitoes from attacking. All
this from an agent that can be produced from fresh garlic!
Work is currently underway, using the latest technology, to allow
us to blast apart a bacterial cell and detect exactly which proteins and
enzymes it can produce. Then the same species is treated with allicin
liquid or powder, blasted apart again and analysed to see which
proteins and enzymes have been disabled and are unable to infect.
We already know that allicin is capable of penetrating bacterial cell
walls and preventing the release of many enzymes that are toxic to
humans. Allicin formulations are also effective against a wide
spectrum of bacterial species, viral infections, fungal and protozoal
disease as well as a large number of parasite problems. Conclusion
In this book you have read how allicin, ‘Nature’s Antibiotic’, can
kill TB, smallpox, MRSA, Streptococcus species and many more
troubling micro-organisms, with the additional benefit of
strengthening the immune system to prevent further attack and yet not
disrupting or destroying the existing healthy bacteria. There’s a great
deal going on in terms of research and clinical trials. Barely do I finish
a draft of this book when I immediately have to revise it as many
studies on allicin, added to a wide range of other active raw
ingredients, are underway. Aside from this crucial requirement for a
natural antibiotic/antifungal/antiviral, allicin therapy is nolw being
evaluated for the prevention and treatment of the world’s two biggest
killer diseases: cancer and coronary heart disease. In those nations
where garlic consumption, both cooked and raw, is a strong part of
daily life, much lower coronary death rates and significant protection
from cancer are evident. Obviously, there are many other factors
involved but this book, for the first time, considers the broader picture
of medically approved studies and confirms what great physicians,
herbalists and healers have suggested for thousands of years. Namely,
that something garlic produces is good for human health. Now at long
last, after 80 years of trying to release the ‘mother substance’ – the
HEART of garlic – allicin is finally available in sufficient quantities to
act as an effective, natural antibiotic in your body.
