Are Antibiotics Killing Us?

摘要

Alan Hudson likes to tell a story about a soldier and his high school sweetheart. The young man returns from an overseas assignment for their wedding with a clean bill of health, having dutifully cleared up an infection of sexually transmitted chlamydia. "Three weeks later, the wife has a screaming genital infection," Hudson recounts, "and I get a call from the small-town doctor who's trying to save their marriage." The soldier, it seems, has decided his wife must have been seeing other men, which she denies. Hudson pauses for effect, stretching back in his seat and propping his feet on an open file drawer in a crowded corner of his microbiology laboratory at Wayne State Medical School in Detroit "The doctor is convinced she's telling the truth," he continues, folding his hands behind a sweep of white, collar-length hair. "So I tell him, 'Send me a specimen from him and a cervical swab from her.'" This is done after the couple has completed a full course of antibiotic treatment and tested free of infection. "I PCR 'em both," Hudson says, "and he is red hot."