Miracle Cure is the name of a new book just out, written by William Rosen, that explores the introduction of antibiotics into human medicine. It is a touch technical at times, but overall is an easy to understand history lesson.

Some quotes will follow that add light to the debate on the use of antibiotics in animals raised for food:

“..sulfa was used throughout the Second World War to treat everything from wound sepsis to gonorrhea. The first wonder drug, however, was no more immune to the resourcefulness of bacteria than any of its successors.”

“The phenomenon known as acquired antibiotic resistance is no simple thing, and is imperfectly understood even today.”

An attempt to boost the health of cows, chickens, etc. included adding Aureomycin to their feed, a tetracycline that was associated with Vitamin B-12 and the goal was simply to add that vitamin to their diet.

“The results surprised everyone.”

“The very different incentives of pharmaceutical companies and physicians—the first to maximize the revenue from their investments; the other to choose the most powerful treatments for their patients—practically guaranteed a high level of inappropriate use.”

On Chloramphenicol, an antibiotic reserved for the most serious infections because of a fatal side effect called aplastic anemia, the author says “Because all the adverse publicity made it less frequently prescribed, it was far slower to develop antibiotic resistance than the beta-lactam or tetracycline antibiotics.”

In the Saturday Review, on January 3, 1959, the magazine’s science editor wrote an article he titled “Taking the Miracle out of Miracle Drugs.” The first line read, “Prescription of antibiotics without a specific cause for such treatment has reached disturbing proportions.”

The book laments the fact that by 1958 pharmaceutical companies had developed the mantra that “if some is good, more must be better.”

In that year, there were no fewer than 63 fixed-dose combination antibiotics. “Four of them contained five antibiotics each, eight had four, twenty used three, and ‘only’ twenty-nine were humble enough to combine a mere two.“

The book begins with the story of Anne Miller, a young woman who suffered a miscarriage on Valentine Day in 1940 and followed with a life-threatening Septicemia (blood poisoning) from Streptococcus. She was nearly dead when a variety of circumstances produced one-half of the entire U.S. penicillin supply to her physician. (Wikipedia says it was in 1942)

Obviously she survived and was the first life to be saved by penicillin, living another 59 years.

And of course the WWII effort, funded by governments to produce penicillin in masses, is detailed.

The summary included the fact that in one decade nearly every class of antibiotics was discovered using lessons learned from penicillin, and the struggling pharmaceutical companies now had a money maker and grew exponentially to where they are today.

The book also explains why some medications are misused despite the science, and states that “to epidemiologists and public health researchers, the scariest thing said by a physician is any sentence that begins with, ‘In my experience.’”

Amen to that.

Miracle Cure

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