Antibiotic resistance is being talked about as the new threat to humans. Antibiotics often don’t work because too many bacteria have acquired resistance. Patients who have infections are dying in thousands because there are no effective antibiotics available.

The establishment figures who are currently talking about this problem are half a century late. And they know damned well that nothing will be done about antibiotic resistance.

By Dr Vernon Coleman

I’ve been screaming about this very problem for 50 years. My warnings have been regularly dismissed and I’ve been attacked and sneered at for making the warnings.

Look at this quote which comes from my book `The Medicine Men’ which was published in 1975:

`Drugs lose their potency as antibiotics as the bacteria they are intended to kill adapt themselves to their use. Resistance can spread quickly through a colony of bacteria.

Between 1963 and 1970 there was an extensive outbreak of multiple drug-resistant salmonella in Great Britain in both cattle and human beings. In Guatemala there were recently 12,000 deaths due to dysentery; these were blamed on the growing antibiotic resistance to enteric bacteria. Since the problem of antibiotic resistance first became apparent in 1959 when shigella in Japan became resistant to drugs, there have been many other examples.

Because putting antibiotics in animal feeds protects the animals from infection, many farmers have been doing this for some time. It was reckoned in 1968 that antibiotics in feed supplements were saving British pig and poultry farmers about £40 million a year. Unfortunately, however, due to organisms becoming more resistant, fourteen babies died at a Teesside hospital.

A good result of this tragedy was the formation of the Swann Committee to look into the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry. The Committee was formed in May 1968 and during the following couple of years the drug industry (busily selling antibiotics to both doctors and farmers) battled against its recommendations, which were that the Ministry of Agriculture should restrict the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry.

The Office of Health Economics published a booklet on the subject in 1969 which was rather one-sided and which put forward the benefits of using antibiotics in rearing animals. The Office of Health Economics was founded and is largely financed by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. Other abortive attempts were made by the drug industry to oppose the recommendations of the Swann Committee. The editor of a weekly scientific journal who mildly criticised an involved drug company reported that the managing director of the company wrote to the chairman of his publishing company `clearly expecting the chairman to take internal action’.’

That quote was from `The Medicine Men’ which I wrote in 1975 and which is now out of print.

Since then I have repeatedly pointed out that antibiotic resistance is not simply a problem caused by the over-use of antibiotics by doctors. The routine prescribing of antibiotics by vets – to be given to health farm animals – is an even bigger problem.

I once remonstrated with a vet who was over-prescribing antibiotics. His reply was that if he didn’t prescribe the antibiotics another vet would do so and he’d lose the business.

The problem is that there are too many commercial interests involved.

The pharmaceutical industry wants to sell as many antibiotics as it possibly can.

Farmers want to keep using antibiotics – to improve their profits.

The medical profession and the mainstream media are now owned by the drug industry and won’t say anything which might upset the drug industry.

Everyone with a medical degree knows that antibiotic resistant bugs have killed far more people than the over-promoted rebranded flu.

But nobody gives a toss.

And I have no doubt that I’ll continue to be vilified and demonised for mentioning the truth.

It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that allowing antibiotic resistance to spread unchecked is part of the establishment’s plan to reduce the world population by 90%.

Vernon Coleman’s international bestseller Superbody – The secret of survival in the 21st Century explains how to boost your immune system and how to increase your resistance to infection and disease. Superbody is available as a paperback and an eBook.