Search This Blog

Friday, November 25, 2011

Killing Me Softly... (Part II)

I found an interesting map with a pattern relating antibiotics and obesity, stroke and diabetes.



The darker the blue the higher the prescription rate.  From the link: "In 2007 the average number of dispensed outpatient antibiotic prescriptions per 1,000 inhabitants at the national level is 858, or 0.86 prescriptions per person...

... six major therapeutic classes: penicillins, cephalosporins, quinolones, macrolides, tetracyclines, trimethoprim-sulfa (TMP-SMZ) and other drugs, including vancomycin, carbapenems and linezolid. ...
"

You then start looking maps for things like stroke deaths from the National Stroke Mortality Atlas:


And you see an interesting overlap.

Ditto for diabetes (see Wired for more maps and link info):



and obesity:





Notice a pattern?

A swath through the Appalachians of high disease incidence.

Take a look at CDDEP for the complete details.

What's most remarkable according to the linked Wired commentary is that one of the potential causes for this pattern of disease is the over-prescription of antibiotics killing off crucial gut bacteria.  Without these gut bacteria the bodies systems go haywire and diseases like diabetes (Type II), strokes and other problems appear.

I've talked about this kind of thing before as related to childhood asthma (my post "Antibiotics = Childhood Asthma").

There is quite a "chicken and egg" issue here which must be unraveled too.  Are the antibiotics the cause of the problems or a symptom, for example, of an unhealthy population.

Again there are reasons, according to the Wired article, to believe that antibiotics are part of the problem as opposed to the cause.

(I've used similar maps in other posts I have made regarding health but I can't find them...)

In any case the use of antibiotics in both human and animal populations is, I think, a national health issue that should be addressed.

So if its not the chemical-stuffed turkey killing you it may be the antibiotics.

Have a nice holiday!


No comments:

Post a Comment