You never get something for nothing, especially not in health
care. Every test, every incision, every little pill brings benefits and risks.
Nowhere is that balance
tilting more ominously in the wrong direction than in the once halcyon realm of infectious diseases, that big success
story of the 20th century. We have had antibiotics since the mid-1940s — just about as
long as we have had the atomic bomb, as Dr. Martin J. Blaser points out — and
our big mistake was failing long ago to appreciate the parallels between the
two.
Antibiotics have cowed many of our old bacterial enemies into
submission: We aimed to blast them off the planet, and we dosed accordingly.
Now we are beginning to reap the consequences. It turns out that not all germs
are bad — and even some bad germs are not all bad. In “Missing Microbes,” Dr. Blaser,
a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at New York University,
presents the daunting array of reasons we have to rethink the enthusiastic
destruction of years past.
Click here for the full
book review in the New York Times.