14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific investigation, it would appear that taking antibiotics to treat viruses such as the common cold or the flu makes the microorganisms stronger, rather than destroy them. These are very important results, and ones that people need to listen to.
Now that self-medication has become common practice, and drugs can be sold in pharmacies, more and more people take matters into their own hands, treating themselves when they are cold or have the flu.
One widespread method of doing this is to take antibiotics. How people got it into their heads that antibiotics can fight viruses is something that experts are still debating, but the fact of the matter is that these drugs do nothing to help.
Instead, they may even contribute to making the viral agents even more easily transmittable, and even resistant to other classes of drugs that would normally kill them. Antibiotics are made to combat bacteria, and not viruses.
In the new research, carried out by experts at the Yale University, mice that had the flu were either given antibiotics, or nothing at all. After analyzing their evolution, experts said that the mice in the group which received the antibiotics fared much worse off than those that got nothing.
Scientists say that antibiotics should not be taken during viral infections for a simple reason – the drugs contribute to killing friendly bacteria, that are involved in regulating the actions of the immune system.
So people are basically making themselves weaker by taking the antibiotics, and are depriving their bodies of the defense mechanisms necessary to successfully fight off the pathogen agents. The friendly microorganisms are called commensal bacteria.
“There’s a lot of beneficial effects of having commensal bacteria. This is one that was unexpected, but makes sense,” explains Yale professor Akiko Iwasaki, the immunology expert that led the new study.
“What’s fascinating about [the new study] is that there’s a distant regulation of resistance to viruses by gut microbiota,” adds University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky, quoted by Science News.
The new study also opens up some interesting research possibilities. Experts at Yale hypothesize that it could be possible to design probiotic drugs, that could boost the gut bacteria's natural fighting abilities.
Such an achievement would make it a lot easier for the immune system to respond to threats, and would make it more resilient overall, experts say.