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Oddly enough, the best bet may be to use microorganisms to defeat microorganisms.

For over a hundred years, science has known about “bacteriophages”, microorganisms that consume other microorganisms. It was thought that they could be used to fight pathogens, but by themselves they can’t, because pathogens adapt to them even faster than they do to antibiotics.

But ordinary, “good” bacteria have another way of fighting “bad” bacteria. Simply by “shouldering them out”, physically occupying the living area the pathogens need to function and grow.

Antibiotics, however, change this equation. While used to fight “bad” bacteria, they also damage the “good” bacteria. So if the “bad” bacteria are resistant to that antibiotic, suddenly they have a lot of “wide open space” to live and multiply.

The easiest solution would be to flood the region with good bacteria, so they can again limit the space needed by the bad bacteria.

In the human GI tract, there are about 300-1000 different kinds of bacteria. Of these, only 30-40 varieties of good bacteria take up almost all the space.

One way of boosting their numbers is called “probiotics”, the live bacteria found in yoghurt and some other foods, or even in pill form. A particularly good one is fairly new to the grocery store market, but already available in a few brands. It is called “Kerin”, and is like a yoghurt smoothie. It contains as many as 10 different kinds of good bacteria.

Along with a healthy diet and maintaining good vitamin D levels, such foods are good not just for health maintenance, but recovery from antibiotic-damage to the intestinal flora before the bad bacteria can have a population explosion.