What happened to the natural immunity of human beings to pathogenic bacteria?
Why has that changed? One of the problems we have is that we are actually not dirty enough. Growing up in too clean an environment means that the immune system, one could say, is searching for things to react to. It has not had enough exercise to mount the immune responses it is supposed to, so it mounts inappropriate responses instead. Allergies, asthma and so on are the result. The immune system is reacting to things it shouldn’t be reacting to. It may be that, like peanut hypersensitivity, or sensitivity to shellfish, nickel, milk and so on, our immune systems are not sufficiently trained early enough. So when babies are eating snails and shovelling dirt into their mouths, it is probably a good thing. Is it ever possible to block antibiotic resistance forever? Firstly, we can realise that any individual antibiotic or disinfectant has a shelf life [when its effectiveness expires]. It will only work for so long. Gradually, more and more things will become resistant to it. We need to t
