Dr. Amy Nett: So, there are no clear studies on antibiotic resistance with herbal antimicrobials, but it’s thought to be significantly less because herbal antimicrobials, especially the way we use them in these combination products such as GI-Synergy, they’re using a number of different mechanisms to kill off the microbes. We think that the risk then is going to be much less than with conventional antibiotics because, you’ll remember, conventional antibiotics are designed in a way that a pharmaceutical company identifies a mechanism to kill a microbe. So, what happens is the microbes then end up evolving or developing a way around how that drug was designed. It’s a lot easier for microbes to evolve new mechanisms to avoid being killed by pharmaceuticals that have a single mechanism of action. It’s a lot more difficult when you’re using a number of different antimicrobial herbs that have a number of different functions and are affecting the microbes in a different way. So, at this point, I don’t know that there has been a reported case of resistance to an antimicrobial.
That said, you can also—I don’t know that it’s resistance, per se, but as we’re working with MARCoNS, multiple antibiotic-resistance coagulation-negative Staphylococci, and this applies specifically to chronic inflammatory response syndrome, so, you know, not directly related to the course material, we are having a difficult time treating it with, like, the BEG nasal spray, which is an antibiotic. We’re starting to look at, are there herbals to treat with that? Because that one has been particularly difficult to treat. It will be interesting to see if we are able to get it with the herbals, or if some microbes are going to be resistant to herbals as well. That will be sort of a topic, especially when we get to chronic inflammatory response syndrome on one of these one-off courses. At this time, we really don’t worry about herbal antimicrobial resistance the same way that we do with conventional antibiotics, but I think you’re smart to think about that because, of course, there is a potential for it. There’s a potential for it. Okay, so hopefully that answers that question, Lauren.