The Complete Home Guide to Herbs, Natural Healing, and Nutrition

108 The Complete Home Guide to Herbs, Natural Healing, and Nutrition
We often think we’re steps ahead, only to fi nd we’re steps behind. A
classic example was the law passed in the 1980s insisting that all chopping
boards in catering kitchens must be made of plastic. Years later it was
discovered that plastic chopping boards harbored unchallenged germs in
tiny cutting grooves, whereas the natural essential oils, resins, and gums
within wooden ones were natural and ongoing germ destroyers,
constantly being released when chopped upon. It appears that wood is a
living organism, rooted or unrooted.
Human beings, like other large species, evolve slowly. Microbes do not.
They adapt and mutate incredibly quickly, and even if the world’s
wealthier countries eventually fi nd some way to control them, they will
still go on killing the inhabitants of poorer regions until those people
fi nally become immune. The 1.7 billion people who were infected with
tuberculosis ba cillus in 1993, but who nevertheless didn’t develop the
disease, illustrate this process. Every year, 100 million people contract
malaria. Two children die of it every minute, thanks to the collapse of a
number of programs set up to eradicate it. The standard drugs being used
are simply not as effective as they once were.
Many “old” diseases or diseases prevalent in the third-world countries
have returned to and are spreading in the developed world — dengue
fever, diphtheria, salmonellosis, pneumococcus, and listeriosis have all
become more and more resistant to antibiotics. In fact, the U.S. National
Institutes of Health has called it an epidemic of microbial resistance.
Infectious diseases are still the world’s leading cause of death, killing at
least 17 million people each year. According to the World Health
Organization, up to half the 5.72 billion people on earth are at risk of
endemic disease.
Tuberculosis has made a big comeback, killing 3.1 million people a
year with a more lethal strain of the disease that some say is potentially
more dangerous than AIDS. The number of cases of hepatitis B has risen
dramatically; in fact, viruses in general are on the increase, including viral
meningitis, dengue fever, and so on. It is now thought that viruses that are
able to hibernate for years may be the cause of many seemingly unrelated
problems, from cancer to other chronic illnesses. Plants are able to disarm
viruses and therefore we must learn more about them. Acute and chronic
respiratory infections have risen to 4.4 million new cases a year. These
alarming increases may be due to a combination of pollution and the
overuse of anti biotics — sending out a clear message that we need to learn
how to take care of ourselves.
American professor Paul Ewald has published a book called Evolution
of Infectious Diseases, in which he strongly suggests that diseases long
ascribed to genetic or environmental factors are actually caused by