What Can You Do
to Counter E. coli?

Does a farmer ever address concerns about seeds without addressing those of the soil? A farmer is likely to look askance if posed this question. Seeds enter his consciousness once in the planting season and then recede until the next season. So the question would seem trivial. He is likely to dismiss it with a knowing smile as parents often do with questions from their toddlers.

How often do doctors address concerns about the “soil” of their patients—the gut, blood, liver, and other body organs—when treating infections? Many of them are likely to be irritated by the question. They know that the matters of that soil require ecologic thinking and integrative acting. However, that is outside the professional standards they are required to follow. There are no drugs that can nourish and detoxify the gut, blood, and liver. Nor are there any surgical procedures to nurture any other tissues. So, the talk of nutrition, detox, and environment is unsettling.

Lessons of Epidemics

What should epidemics teach doctors? In the past, epidemics taught some important lessons about the microbes but more often the lessons concerned the environmental conditions—poverty, squalor, and malnutrition—that led us to advances in personal hygiene, public health, and social changes. Now the darkening clouds of climatic chaos, oxygen dysfunctions, and oceanic acidification are raising altogether new specters of global epidemics. Now, the imperatives of the soil (internal and external environment) are far more compelling than those of the seeds (microbes).

Microbial epidemics, in my view, call for serious consideration of the following two elements:

What is different between those with weakened anti-microbial defenses who sicken and die from the other hundreds of thousands who are exposed but remain healthy?

What can people do to strengthen their anti-microbial defenses to ward off the microbes in and )epidemic (as well as non-epidemic) setting?

Below, I outline simple measureswhich people can consider in enhancing their anti-microbial defenses. I follow that with brief comments about lapdog joes—the society’s watch dogs who morph into lapdogs—among medical professors, media, government, and legislative policymakers.

Simple Ways of Strengthening Anti-microbial Defenses

Many natural remedies are generally convenient and available for preserving normal bowel flora and bowel ecology. Following are my preferences that may be used in any combination. Rotation in spices and herbs is desirable for long-term use.

Optimal hydration

Probiotics taken as yogurt and keifer (goat milk products are more desirable).

Infla-oil rubs (natural anti-inflammatory oil) on the abdomen.

Sugar elimination to avoid gut fermentation and production of yeast toxins that poison oxygen-driven anti-microbial defenses.

Vigorous avoidance of constipation (the above steps and extra magnesium and potassium are helpful except for people with idney failure.)

Spices for gentle daily bowel and liver detox (turmeric, ginger, garlic, cumen, coriander, and oregano oil are my preferences).

Herbs for preserving healthy gut microbiota (echinacea, astragalus, burdock root, golden seal root, artemesia, and pau D’Arco are my preferences).

Prevention and control of common viral and bacterial infections

Feather breathing for reducing stress

Clinical Features of E. coli Infections

The initial symptoms of E. coli O157:H7, the strain associated with food-borne infections in the past, often are:

Nausea and vomiting,
Abdominal pain,
Diarrhea, watery at first, often bloody later,
Stomach tenderness (pain to touch), and
Dehydration.
Kidney involvement with blood in the urine and rapidly progressive kidney failure with a condition called HUS (hemolytic-uremic syndrome), is the usual cause of death in fatal cases.