Bakhtin's Carnivalesque : 'Slime Piss' still saving more kiddies annually than Advanced Civilization ever killed

Without today's antibiotics, the dangerous bacterial infections that currently afflict only a child here and a child there would rage freely as epidemics or pandemics, killing millions upon millions of kids.

And when we say 'antibiotics' we basically mean the beta lactams antibiotics - the huge and highly effective family of the penicillin-like antibiotics.

The human use of penicillin (Penicillin G) to save lives is almost ninety years old and yet it is still in every hospital's pharmacy, albeit relatively rarely used.

However, as the starting base to make most all of our other antibiotics, penicillin g is still produced in the tens of thousands of tons.

And still made as it always was - made in incredibly tiny ---natural--- fungus factories invisible to the naked eye.

It is a mere 'secondary' metabolite of the penicillium slime - and for long time the secondary metabolites were considered to be just 'metabolic waste', a fancy grown-up's word for poo and pee.

Considering its liquid nature and its bright yellow color (leaving aside its strong acrid smell for a moment) , the scientists of yesteryear considered it to be nothing more than 'slime piss'.

It took a brave doctor indeed (Martin Henry Dawson) to first inject that foul stuff - raw - into a the bloodstream of a young male, in an attempt to save his life.

But the patient (Charles Aronson) lived and so our Age of Antibiotics began, on Ward G-East, at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre ----- seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015.

In WWII's brutal war of high tech science, this was low tech life saving at its very finest.

A stinging rebuke then, to Scientism at its very apogee of hubris, delivered by the lowest of the low, delivered by slime piss.

So be sure to tell Mikhail Bakhtin (wherever he might be) that it just can't get anymore carnivalesque than that...

the NON-TOXIC mold - ten billion served since Oct 16 1940 : the story of natural penicillin ... and how we almost lost it

Every time we hear about a building closing its doors because of toxic mold , let us always remind ourselves that for every door that closes sometimes a thousand or a million , nay billions upon billions,  open in its place.


Yes ,some strains of some mold species , under highly specific environmental conditions,  are somewhat toxic (even highly toxic to immune weak individuals).

But other molds - such as the mold that produces the original natural penicillin - are resoundingly non-toxic and continue to be the biological base from which almost all of today's best anti-bacterial agents are still made.

Thanks to the herd-immunity-like effect that happened when public domain natural penicillin became ultra cheap and globally available , I estimate ten billion of us have lead healthier happier lives since Henry Dawson gave the first antibiotics injection on October 16th 1940.

Cheap ,widely available penicillin allowed even poor nations to reduce the incidence of endemic pools of pathogenic strains of common virulent bacteria among their poor and the rurally isolated.

These national pools of poverty, isolation and infectious diseases had kept these diseases globally endemic for thousands of years .

For example, a short twenty years after penicillin's introduction, Rheumatic Fever (until 1960 the leading cause of school age death due to infection) quickly became something that younger doctors only read about in a medical history book - but never themselves saw in their entire careers.

So loudly curse the toxic molds - but spare a moment to silently thank the Non-Toxic mold - saving lives for seventy five wonderful years as of next October 16th 2015 .

Because as once famous advertising firm Ayer's reminds us, we almost lost natural penicillin - thanks to the best of Allied science - it almost got away....

An "Open Letter" to people who OPPOSE next year's celebrating 75 years of Antibiotics

While there are huge numbers of people out there who adamantly oppose vaccines flat out, most people only oppose the mis-use or over-use of antibiotics - as do all doctors and scientists.

But a few people quietly oppose antibiotics totally : those in the natural health field ,  who'd rather you'd spend your health dollars on healthy natural foods that keep your natural immunity at 100% efficiency.

Perhaps this lack of opposition to all antibiotic use, compared to the opposition to all vaccines, it is a measure of how stupid we humans can be at times.

Why else do we give a much greater weight to a drug that immediately cures us from an ongoing painfully fatal disease than we do to a vaccine that years earlier quietly prevented us from ever getting painfully and fatally sick in the first place ?

Clean water and good sewers, plentiful food , warm dry homes, less stress from trying to managing on below-poverty wages , childhood vaccines --- all have done far far more than antibiotics ever have to reduce our chances of dying early.

But when these frontline defences fail, there is no getting around the fact that naturally-produced antibiotics have saved far more lives than all the Man-made synthetic anti-bacterials ever have.

Natural Health Movement

So this a sort of an Open Letter to my friends in the Natural Health movement.

Yes, please continue to oppose the over-use and mis-use of antibiotics and yes please continue to advocate clean water, healthy food and homes and happy minds as key to preventing us ever getting sick.

But when we do get deathly ill from a bacteria disease, is it really so wrong to let naturally-made penicillin fight back the disease so we can live out our three score and ten ?

Please don't oppose the 75th anniversary celebrations of Martin Henry Dawson birthing the Age of Antibiotics with his selfless "Penicillin-for-All"  October 16th 1940 in Manhattan.

After all , that man sacrificed his own life to selflessly help others - what gives you the fracking right to come around and kick yet more dirt on his grave --- didn't the Anglo-American medical establishment do enough of that already ?