Martin Blaser - Missing Microbes: How Killing Bacteria Creates Modern Plagues

Why are you fat, why does your son have asthma, and why is your thirteen-year-old daughter six feet tall? Martin Blaser says our bodies are missing vital, beneficial bacteria, and I guarantee that after reading this book you will agree. Take a pass on the antibiotics and read Missing Microbes.

Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Coming Plague

In Missing Microbes, Martin Blaser sounds [an] alarm. He patiently and thoroughly builds a compelling case that the threat of antibiotic overuse goes far beyond resistant infections.

Nature

A masterful work of preventive health and superb science writing.

Booklist, starred review

Most bacteria are our friends even if we dont yet realize it. In this book, Martin Blaser opens a window on the unseen microbes who live with us and have made us their home. We should appreciate them for everything they do for usincluding keeping many nasty pathogens at bay. I recommend Missing Microbes to everyone, whether scientist or lay reader. Lets make peace, not war, with the bacteria who support us.

Sir Richard J. Roberts, Nobel Prizewinning biologist

As a world leader in defining the microbiome, Dr Blaser explains how disturbing its natural balance is affecting common conditions such as obesity and diabetes, long thought of as primarily nutrition and lifestyle related problems. Blasers carefully and convincingly written book outlines new dimensions that need to be considered in fighting a number of common diseases and in promoting health and well-being.

Richard Deckelbaum, Director, Institute of Human Nutrition, Columbia University

Blaser presents a sensible plan for reclaiming our microbial balance and avoiding calamity both as a societyand on the individual level.

Discover magazine

I have often wondered why kids today seem to have such a high incidence of asthma, ear infections, allergies, reflux oesophagitis, and so many other conditions that I rarely saw growing up. This mystery has been solved by the pioneering work of Dr Martin Blaser and is communicated brilliantly in Missing Microbes. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this book to your own health, to the health of your children and grandchildren and to the health of our society. Missing Microbes is truly a must read.

Arthur Agatston, New York Times bestselling author of The South Beach Diet

An engrossing examination of the relatively unheralded yet dominant form of life on Earth.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

We live today in a world of modern plagues, defined by the alarming rise of asthma, diabetes, obesity, food allergies, and metabolic disorders. This is no accident, argues Martin Blaser, the renowned medical researcher: the common link being the destruction of vital bacteria through the overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Missing Microbes is science writing at its very bestcrisply argued and beautifully written, with stunning insights about the human microbiome and workable solutions to an urgent global crisis.

David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer prizewinning author of Polio

Unlike some books on medicine and microbes, Dr Blaser doesnt stir up fears of exotic diseases or pandemic superbugs resistant to all known drugs. He focuses on a simpler but more profound concern: the damage that modern life inflicts on a vast number of microbes that all of us, even healthy people, carry inside us at all times.

Wall Street Journal

In a world that turns to antibiotics for every infection of the ear, sinuses, or skin, Dr Blaser makes even the most nervous parent think twice about giving her child these ubiquitous drugs. He contends that the excessive use of antibioticsespecially in childrenis at the root of our most serious emerging modern maladies, from asthma and food allergies to obesity and certain cancers. He walks us through the science behind his theories and examines the duality of microbes, both as essential agents of good health and perpetrators of sickness Blaser delivers a thoughtful, well-written, and compelling case for why doctors need to be more cautious about prescribing these medications and why consumers should consider alternatives before taking them.

Nirav R. Shah MD, MPH, Commissioner of Health, New York State

Credit Blaser for displaying the wonders and importance of a vast underworld we are jeopardizing but cannot live without.

Kirkus

Dr Blasers credibility as a world-class scientist and physician makes this exploration of our bodys microbial world particularly provocative. Missing Microbes will make you rethink some fundamental ideas about infection. Blasers gift is to write clearly and to take the reader on a fascinating journey through the paradoxes and insights about the teeming world within us.

Abraham Verghese MD, bestselling author of Cutting for Stone

A Oneworld Book

This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2014

First published in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth by Oneworld Publications 2014

Published in North America by Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Copyright Martin J. Blaser 2014

The moral right of Martin J. Blaser to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78074-441-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-78074-442-1

Cover design by shepherdstudio.co.uk

Interior design by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Oneworld Publications 10 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3SR, England

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To my children, and to future children with a bright future

We live in the Age of Bacteria (as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, until the world ends)...

S TEPHEN J AY G OULD , Cambridge, MA, 1993

I never knew two of my fathers sisters. In the little town where they were born, early in the last century, they didnt see their second birthdays. They had high fevers, and I am not sure what else. The situation was so dire that my grandfather went to the prayer house and changed his daughters names to fool the angel of death. He did this for each girl. It did no good.

In 1850, as many as four in ten English babies died before his or her first birthday. Lethal epidemics swept through crowded cities, as people were packed into dark, dirty rooms with fetid air and no running water. Familiar scourges included cholera, pneumonia, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and smallpox.

Today, fewer than five in every thousand infants in the United Kingdom are expected to die before age onea remarkable improvement. Over the past century and a half, the nation as well as other countries in the developed world milk, childhood vaccinations, modern medical procedures including anaesthesia, and, of course, nearly seventy years of antibiotics.