Emily's Reviews > Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

I picked this up because I was actually a subject in one of Dr. Blaser's experiments a few years back when I worked at NYU--the study was about the microbiome of people who do or don't have eczema and I was a control subject, which required me to walk downstairs to his lab every few months and have a grad student swab my elbow, cheek, and knee.

The book was worthwhile but I wish Blaser had put more effort into explaining the science at a deeper level. While he avoids the faux-peppy style I've complained about before, he explains binomial nomenclature and other topics that you'd think any adult bothering to pick up a book like this would understand. The "how" in "How the overuse of antibiotics is fueling our modern plagues" means "I'm going to assert that" instead of "I'm going to explain in detail the means by which."

To backtrack a little, here's Blaser's thesis in a nutshell. Humans are covered with zillions of bacteria that live in different mixtures in different parts of the body, like the skin, intestine, or vagina. (Whenever I think of this, I picture Mr. Burns's Spruce Moose freakout on The Simpsons.) We are overusing antibiotics in a variety of contexts: using them in a knee-jerk way when they're not even needed for minor complaints; giving them to livestock to promote growth; giving them to children in a critical window of their development; using broad-spectrum antibiotics which are efficient to develop and sell rather than narrow-range ones that don't cause as much collateral damage to the microbiome. Antibiotics don't kill all the bacteria, but they change the environment so that helpful ones may lose out or destructive ones get a leg up. Blaser tries to show how this imbalance could be implicated in all sorts of modern conditions like asthma, obesity, etc.

The research is still in early stages, so he doesn't yet have a pill full of specific bacteria to fiddle with your natural population and knock out your allergies. Still, the book could change your behavior in terms of what kind of food you buy (do you pay extra for the no-antibiotics chicken?) and what you ask your doctor for (do you beg for antibiotics, or start questioning whether they're really needed?). Also, he is trying to raise awareness of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the possibility of a fast-moving superplague we're not equipped to fight.

This was a fine read, but I could have walked, not run, to read it.