She didn’t have her textbook like she normally did. Ms. Susan stood at the front of the classroom still wearing her heavy blue winter parka. Stepping down from the frozen stairwell then into the basement classroom I took a seat.
“You won’t need your textbooks today. I have some important information about the latest findings from the CDC that could effect all of us,” Ms. Susan announced.
It was colder that morning. The icy chill in the air stung my cheeks. My insides were shivering. My fingers were frozen-numb, almost too stiff to hold a pen.
I could hear the faint sighs of relief as the students who sat near my seat shifted and relaxed. Our normal curriculum was apparently not a favorite one. There were too many facts and figures we had to memorize of what exactly makes up a protein or sugar molecule and why it matters to the human body.
Ms. Susan looked around the classroom and paused for a moment. The sounds of chairs scraping across the concrete floor, papers shuffling could be heard across the room as the students settled in their seats.
“The CDC is reporting that we’re killing and weakening our immune systems by our overuse of antibiotics. We wash our hands with antibiotic creams and soaps. We wash our dishes, our clothes and our floors with antibiotic cleansers. Our kids catch a cold and we give them antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics is bypassing the human immune system denying what it is designed to do.
The human immune system is designed to detect, destroy and eliminate the viruses and bacteria. It’s job is to remove anything that doesn’t belong in the body. But when we use antibiotics we are weakening the immune system by not allowing it to do what it is designed to do. It’s like a muscle we don’t use that gets weaker over time. Use it or lose it. It is same with our immune systems. If we don’t use it we lose it.”
As the lecture continued I looked around the room to see if anyone else was paying attention. Most of my classmates were young adults fresh out of high school, dressed in their blue jeans and baby tees or guy-tees and plaid flannel shirts that seemed to be the fashion back then. One of the girls on my left was whispering something to the young man behind her. The guy on my right sat with his head propped up on the palm of his hand. His eyes were only half open. Were they hearing what I was hearing? Did they even care?
“Our vaccines and antibiotics are just not as effective as they should be. What we’re finding is that new strains of viruses that originated in China are learning to overcome the vaccines that we’re developing in the states. The viruses and bacteria are developing immunity to our vaccines and our antibiotics. We believe that somehow the viruses are communicating across the continents.”
I sat there frozen in the metal chair jotting down notes as fast as my figures could move. All I could think of was my precious little son. What had I done? I did everything Ms. Susan was talking about. We used antibiotic soaps to wash our hands and dishes and antibiotics for everything from a simple cough to an earache.
Memories of our visits to the pediatrician ran through my mind. I had taken my son to the doctor so many times in the last few years for everything from a runny nose to a common ear ache. A vision of his frowning baby face with his lips squeezed shut flashed in my mind as I remembered giving him spoonfuls of pink bubblegum flavored amoxicillin.
I believed we were making him stronger and now I was learning that I was making him weaker through the use of antibiotics. What had I done to my precious little son?
A vision was playing across my mind that I had almost forgotten. As if I was looking through a lens into the unseen world of what makes us sick I could see the microscopic black virus in China connected by a tiny thread that reached across the planet to a virus in a test tube. The visions were all imaginary paintings of what my inventive mind could dream up to match the words I was hearing.
“Somehow these viruses are communicating. Current strains of virus and bacteria are learning to defeat the antibiotics and vaccines we are developing in America and are relaying their new defense methods to the viral strains in Asia,” the instructor continued.
A barrage of questions was running through my head as I sat there intent on listening to every word of the lecture. Viruses and bacteria can communicate? If it’s true then it means that viruses and bacteria have some kind of intelligence. How can a virus have intelligence? What kind of intelligence? What were their communication lines made of?
Ms. Susan concluded the lecture and said, “We now believe that the next war we’ll be fighting will be a viral war.”
I left the lecture hall with my head still spinning. What was she saying? That the real enemy is viral? It sounded like a good plot for a science fiction novel, but this was real.
With a new sense of purpose, I was determined to find a way to protect my son and my family. If what we were doing with antibiotics wasn’t working, there had to be another way.
Leave a Reply