Health Industry propagates that germs are evil and at odds with humans. We need to be re-educated about microbes

Modern medicine, scientists, practising doctors, as also the greedy pharmaceutical industry, have been targeting all microbes since the 1800s, trying to win the battle against germs using drugs, vaccines and even good hygienic methods based on antiseptics of all kinds. These very germs have now evolved into deadlier germs and grown resistant to several drugs. These super-bugs have been the cause of many hospital-based (nosocomial) infections, especially among the elderly getting admitted to intensive care units (ICUs); lately, these ICUs have become highways to what was known as hospitalism in the 18th century!

In the year 2000, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote that we should get off the moral high horse and stop calling ‘germs evil and ourselves good’. He wrote that each host and its parasite (man and germ) forge a new super-organism with their genomes merging with one another, yoked as a chimera.

Ever since, workers like Steven Gill at the University of Buffalo, Jeffrey Gordon and Herbert Virgin of Washington University School of medicine in St Louis and Sarkis Mazmanian of California Institute of Technology, have all come across evidence that there are many such chimeras inside the human system of which the human genome is only a small minority of our meta-genome with thousands of genes incorporated into our cells over millions of years of evolution.

In addition, humans have vital genes along with the nuclear genes that we already know of. Douglas C Wallace, in his epoch-making article in the journal, Genetics, demonstrated using his new MITCHIP, that the mitochondrial genes do most of our work. You may be shocked to know that nine out of ten body cells are microbial and not yours! In the gut alone more than 1,000 species of germs bring 100 times more genes than our own body’s cell DNA carries. Microbial genes control the energy that we absorb from our food and also how our immune system functions.

These ideas of micro-biomes and virinomes (meta-genomes with germs and viruses) would have been thought of as madness by our reductionist pundits who get millions of dollars of grants for genetic engineering and stem cell research. If one patient with blindness regains sight with the help of stem cell therapy, it is highlighted in the newspapers as a great discovery, while thousands of failures of the same are never reported.

The same is true of genetic engineering where the large majority of interventions does not help the patient; it might even produce another new disease. But research funding in these fields continues, not knowing that the millions of germ genomes incorporated into us are having a hearty laugh at our foolishness.

Until 1999, microbiologists had no clue that they were missing millions of species of germs. The enormous undercounting of the species came to light with David Relman of Stanford University showing many more species from human gum smear cultures. Turning to gut and stool specimens they discovered hundreds of new, hitherto unknown, species. That was the beginning of the thinking on meta-genomes.
 
In addition, we also know something new in another area of germ and man relationship which might open another Pandora’s Box in the near future. “In 1934, a German scientist named Emmy Klieneberger-Nobel discovered that the bacteria in her Petri dish had changed form and lost their cell walls. Seventy years later, biomedical researcher Trevor Marshall created a model describing how these bacteria, along with intracellular bacteria and pathogens that live together inside protected communities called biofilms, might be able to cause chronic disease and dysregulate the immune system.” (see http://bacteriality.com/about-2)

The next time you have a minor illness (common cold, or flu-like illness), avoid antibiotics. Even when your doctor wants to prescribe it, ask him if it is absolutely necessary. Avoid antiseptic soaps; simple soap and water is good enough for any washing.

Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS.