Missing Microbes Quotes

“Today, an estimated 70–80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used for the single purpose of fattening up farm animals:”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“As long as amoxicillin is given to our children who have pneumococci in their noses and throats, whether harmless or not, antibiotic resistance is inevitable.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“Along with better training, pediatricians need better pay. Paradoxically, physicians involved in the primary care of our children—the doctors on the front lines who receive tens of thousands of visits every day from parents and their children—are among the lowest paid of all physicians in the United States. Something is wrong with our system when the doctor who performs a brief diagnostic procedure—some form of X-ray, for example, or a fifteen-minute operation—is paid many times more than the doctors making crucial decisions about our children’s health.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“In 1850, one in four American babies died before his or her first birthday.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“when equilibria are perturbed, bad things can happen”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“The simplest explanation is that antibiotics lead to a shift in the overall equilibrium of our gut microbes. Some bugs become more dominant; others are suppressed”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“the earlier in life farmers started giving animals antibiotics, the stronger the effect.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“farmers have found that virtually any antibiotic promotes the growth of their livestock.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“exposure to antibiotics early in life causes microbial perturbations at a crucial time, just when organs and systems are developing.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“Bacterial specialization is a thrilling and largely unexplored realm in uncovering what makes each of us distinct in terms of”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“It should be clear by now that even short-term antibiotic treatments can lead to long-term shifts in the microbes colonizing our bodies. A full recovery or bounce-back of healthy bacteria is in no way guaranteed, despite the long-held belief that such was the case. But that is not my only worry. I also fear that some of our residential organisms—what I think of as contingency species—may disappear altogether.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“Microbes are invisible to our naked eye, with a few exceptions that reinforce the rule. Millions can fit into the eye of a needle. But if you were to gather them all up, not only would they outnumber all the mice, whales, humans, birds, insects, worms, and trees combined—indeed all of the visible life-forms we are familiar with on Earth—they would outweigh them as well. Think about that for a moment. Invisible microbes comprise the sheer bulk of the Earth’s biomass, more than the mammals and reptiles, all the fish in the sea, the forests.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“Doctors need rapid tests, enabling them to sample blood, sputum, exhaled air, or urine to look for the chemical signature of particular organisms. With that information, your doctor could reach into a formulary and take out the best narrow-spectrum agent for your condition.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“the paradox remains that we use far too many antibiotics, but we don’t have enough of the right ones to treat an emerging burden of these antibiotic-resistant infections.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“I do not wish to ban antibiotics or Cesarian sections any more than anyone would suggest banning automobiles. I ask only that they be used more wisely and that antidotes to their worst side effects be developed. The truth is always obvious in retrospect. How could people really have thought that the sun revolves around Earth or that Earth is flat? Yet dogma are powerful and to their adherents infallible.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“We think that cutting routine office visits to twenty minutes, fifteen minutes, even ten minutes will save money when in fact, with less time for doctors to examine and less time to think, we are incurring far greater costs through excessive testing and needless treatment.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“Pathologists and physicians need to recognize that “inflammation” of the stomach is normal.”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

“While I was working on C. fetus and C. jejuni in the early 1980s, a new relative of Campylobacter was discovered in, of all places, the stomach. Dubbed “gastric campylobacter-like organism” or GCLO (we now call it Helicobacter pylori),”
― Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues