Bug Warfare Woes—Part 2

There is another way to deal with the invasions of microorganisms that promises a far more effective approach to dealing with various diseases caused by bugs. Rather than go to war with them, we could engage with them in positive ways that disarm them, and then live with them. This approach does not force them to become more virulent and fight back. This is a smarter, nonviolent approach.

We have already used this approach in developing vaccines. The process of creating many vaccines is to cause the harmful microorganism to evolve into a milder form in a laboratory, which we then inject into people. As a result, a person develops immunity to that milder bug (that we have literally bred) as well as the more harmful one, without getting sick. There is no attempt to kill off the microorganisms; instead, we disarm them (make them less virulent) and then live with them by building immunity. This is a way of duplicating how we naturally encounter many nonlethal kinds of bugs, which do not do us much harm at all—such as the rhinovirus that causes the common cold (which is a distant cousin to the SARS-2 virus that causes COVID-19).

This is how we can come to live with organisms that hardly make us sick—by transforming them into less deadly mutations. Many of the viruses and bacteria that invade us really have no intention of causing us serious harm. All they want to do is breed, multiply, and flourish—just as all life does. If they can do that without sickening us, that would be fine with them. In fact, our health can be important to their well-being… if we die, they must quickly find another host before they too expire. 

They are, however, in constant competition with other kinds of microorganisms (sort of a bug arms race), so they try to reproduce in huge quantities. That sometimes causes them to get out of hand, or evolve into extremely virulent bugs that cause diseases such as malaria, cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, and others.

We now have the science to characterize the genetic makeup of these microorganisms. This knowledge can help us to control their evolution and transform them into weaker, rather than stronger mutations. The fact that they mutate so fast, means that we can alter their genetic character in just a few weeks. When we do so, we need not go to war with heavy weapons that cause them to fight back. We can earn to live with them!

Furthermore the weapons we use to fight microorganisms (such as antibiotics) often cause lots of collateral damage when they also harm the trillions of beneficial bacteria that inhabit our bodies. Thus, after a dose of powerful antibiotics that has wiped out both the bad and the good bacteria, we must then use probiotics to recolonize our gut system with beneficial and necessary bacteria. 

We have the capability to make that transformation to a peaceful coexistence, if we forgo our natural instinct to go to war with every bug that we meet and learn to live harmoniously with them.