Clostridium difficile Destroy too much beneficial gut bacteria with antibiotics, and this little bug takes over, causing what's known as Clostridium difficile disease. Marcus007 via Wikimedia

If you’re one of those people worried that the over-prescription of antibiotics is leading us toward biological calamity, you’re not going to like this. Writing in the journal Nature this week, Martin Blaser of NYU’s Langone Medical Center makes the case that antibiotics aren’t just leading to highly resistant superbugs, but that they are permanently altering our bacterial microbiomes, and not for the better.

Our microbiomes are the collection of bacterial microbes that we carry around with us all the time, those symbiotic little bugs that live on our skin and in our esophagi and--very importantly--in our guts. And while we’ve long known that a cycle of antibiotics prescribed to kill off an infection can also kill off some of our most important beneficial microorganisms, the general line of thinking is that once the cycle of antibiotics ends our microbiomes correct themselves and the natural order of things returns.

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