Not Just Drugs Causing Antibiotic Resistance: Big Ag’s Herbicides Also to Blame

All bacteria will naturally mutate to avoid being killed off. This is the impetus of all life – to save its own skin. However, even with the recent discovery that the overuse of antibiotic drugs has been causing bacteria to morph into superbugs, resistant to the antibiotics used to kill them, we have new evidence of another culprit in the war against disease. It’s Big Ag’s herbicides.

Your body also naturally kills off bacteria, viruses and other foreign pathogens when it isn’t choked with toxic chemicals, but just like the science proving that herbicides are killing off our natural immunity (via the shikimate pathway), we now have proof that while these Big Ag chemicals are making us weaker, they are making bacteria stronger.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has even warned that antibiotic resistance is now a “global threat,” yet one of the problems causing it, is hardly kept in check. In fact, herbicide use in farming, and even landscaping projects, has reached an all-time high.

These herbicides are causing lymphoma, breast cancer, and birth defects, but they are also contributing to antibiotic resistance. This is proved in recent research conducted by the New University of Canterbury which has confirmed that the active ingredients of the most commonly used herbicides, RoundUp, Kamba and 2,4-D (glyphosate, dicamba and 2,4-D), each alone cause antibiotic resistance at concentrations well below label application rates. Who can even imagine what these chemicals due in synergistic concert.

The study abstract states,

“Targeted deletion of efflux pump genes largely neutralized the adaptive response in the cases of increased survival in antibiotics, indicating that the biochemistry of induced resistance was the same for formulations and specific ingredients. We found that glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D, as well as co-formulants in commercial herbicides, induced a change in susceptibility of the potentially pathogenic bacteria E. coli and S. enterica to multiple antibiotics.”

The study looked at just three of the most widely used herbicides in the world – there are thousands more.

Professor Heinemann, a lead investigator on the study said,

“They [glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D] are among the most common manufactured chemical products to which people, pets and livestock in both rural and urban environments are exposed. These products are sold in the local hardware store and may be used without training, and there are no controls that prevent children and pets from being exposed in home gardens or parks. Despite their ubiquitous use, this University of Canterbury research is the first in the world to demonstrate that herbicides may be undermining the use of a fundamental medicine-antibiotics.”

Strange then, that the CDC has even found that 1 in 3 antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary, often times because the offending pathogen is a virus, which wouldn’t even respond to an antibacterial in the first place.

This is even more troubling considering that we could grow more than enough food (10 billion people at least) to feed the planet using organic methods, which require no herbicides at all, and there are dozens of natural antibiotics and antivirals which do not cause antibiotic resistance – or create super bugs that make it harder for our immune systems to fight them off.

Even a short course of antibiotics can lead to resistant bacterial populations taking up residence in our gut which can persist for up to 4 years – or even longer.

Some natural antibiotics you may want to try in place of a doctor’s prescription include:

• Garlic
• Colloidal silver
• Oil of Oregano
• Echinacea
• Manuka honey
• Astragalus
• Turmeric
• Olive leaf
• Mustard seed oil
• Goldenseal
• Cinnamon
• Andrographis
• Echinacea
• Elderberry
• Coconut oil
• Grapefruit seed extract
• Myrh

Image: Shutterstock.