Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World » (Reprint)

Jessica Snyder Sachs is a freelance science writer. Her first book, Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death, was published in 2001. She lives in New Jersey.

Making Peace with Microbes

Public sanitation and antibiotic drugs have brought about historic increases in the human life span; they have also unintentionally produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and our environment. As a result, antibiotic resistance now ranks among the gravest medical problems of modern times. Good Germs, Bad Germs addresses not only this issue but also what has become known as the "hygiene hypothesis"— an argument that links the over-sanitation of modern life to now-epidemic increases in immune and other disorders. In telling the story of what went terribly wrong in our war on germs, Jessica Snyder Sachs explores our emerging understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the human body and its resident microbes—which outnumber its human cells by a factor of nine to one! The book also offers a hopeful look into a future in which antibiotics will be designed and used more wisely, and beyond that, to a day when we may replace antibacterial drugs and cleansers with bacterial ones—each custom-designed for maximum health benefits.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Twin horror stories lead off this slender but vastly informative examination of bacteria and their intimate, complex role in our lives. One is an account of a high school football star stricken by a drug-resistant infection; the second describes a child whose food allergies threaten his life. Jessica Snyder Sachs tells their tales movingly but swiftly leaves them behind for her real subject: how our modern "war on germs" may have given rise to both their conditions. What follows is a Fantastic Voyage through the human body and the world of its millions of microbial denizens. It's a journey that sheds light on why, for all the scientific advances in hygiene and antibiotics, developed countries continue to face new and more daunting challenges in the form of "superbugs" and out-of-control allergies. Sachs isn't afraid of a little lab-speak, and Good Germs, Bad Germs will often make you wish you'd paid more attention in Bio 101. But the author has a knack for giving dramatic form to the many organisms that take the stage here. As she demonstrates how microbes swap genes, send out radar-like detection molecules and brilliantly adapt to the strategies we use against them, we watch their astonishing feats as if in a brilliantly animated film. The result is an important -- and eye-opening -- inquiry into human-microbe coevolution. --Bill Tipper

Seven Key Terms and Conventions     ix
Prologue: A Good War Gone Bad
Ricky's Story     3
Daniel's Story     7
Revenge of the Microbes?     9
The War on Germs
From Miasmas to Microbes     15
Germ Theory Reborn     20
The Sanitarians     26
The Search for Magic Bullets     29
Life on Man
The Body as Ecosystem     35
Into the Mouths of Babes     37
Life on the Surface     41
Life on the Inside     44
Bugs in Space     45
Where No Biologist Has Gone Before     49
The Inner Tube of Life     52
Who's the Boss?     59
A New Window Opens     64
Stealth Infections or Innocent Bystanders?     67
Too Clean?
Hair Trigger     73
From Hippocrates to the Hygiene Hypothesis     76
A History of Self-Destruction     81
Children in the Cowshed     83
Teaching Tolerance     87
Innate Immunity     89
The Dirt Vaccine     91
Old Friends     97
Beyond Immunity     101
Bugs on Drugs
A Killer in the Nursery     105
An End toBacterial Disease?     109
Microscopic Mating Games     111
The Bacterial Superorganism     115
Danger Ignored     116
Old Habits, New Insights     120
Out of the Hospital and into Our Daily Lives     125
The Reservoir Within     131
Resistance by the Shovel     136
Down on the Farm     141
The Antibiotic Paradox     148
Fighting Smarter, Not Harder
The Good Old Days?     151
Preserving Antibiotics: Less Is More     154
Homing In on the Enemy     158
Drugs with On-Off Switches     163
Silencing Resistance     165
Farming Out Resistance     168
Beyond Antibiotics: New Ways to Kill     170
Cocoons and Frog Slime     176
Beyond Lethal Force - Defang, Deflect, and Deploy
Drugs That Disarm     185
Vaccines - Forewarned Is Forearmed     189
Domesticate and Deploy     193
Prescription Probiotics     196
Fighting Fire with Fire     199
A Superhero for the Mouth     203
Transgenic Probiotics     205
Probiotics for Livestock     212
A Second Neolithic Revolution      214
Fixing the Patient
The Dragon Within     219
Enhancing the Bionic Human     225
From Sepsis to Chronic Inflammation     228
Immunobug Immunodrugs     232
Tweaking the Bug     233
Into the Future     234
Coda: Embracing the Microbiome     235
Notes     239
Further Reading     273
Acknowledgments     275
Index     277