Martin Blaser, MD, doesn';;;t dispute the fact that antibiotics have saved innumerable lives and revolutionized medicine. But when he looks at the global increases in recent decades of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, asthma, and obesity, and the concordant rise in antibiotic use, he sees a troubling connection.
"Something very powerful is going on here," Blaser, a professor of medicine and director of the Human Microbiome Program at NYU School of Medicine, told an audience yesterday at the University of Minnesota. Blaser';;;s talk, titled, "The Dark Side of Antibiotics," was the first in a series of lecture on antibiotic resistance hosted by the University of Minnesota';;;s Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences.
For Blaser, author of the book Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling our Modern Plagues, the link between antibiotic overuse and the rise in metabolic conditions revolves around the human microbiome—the collection of microorganisms that reside within us. Observational data from human cohort studies and experiments in mice, he believes, provide persuasive evidence that the amount of antibiotics that humans are using—by recent estimates more than 70 million antibiotic doses annually—are changing the bacterial diversity in the human microbiome, and those changes are contributing to changing physiology.