Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Losing the arms race with nature....

Most of you have heard that many formerly treatable diseases are now becoming resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics. Versions of TB and Syphilis comes to mind here, and there are others. In a like sense, our ability to fend off parasites to our food crops is also waning. Weeds are becoming resistant to herbicides, and this is forcing the big Agribusiness firms to genetically modify our core food crops to handle high levels of herbicides. These modified food crops are now suspected of being long term threats to the health of the consumers who routinely ingest them. GMO corn has shown a strong capacity to damage the livers and kidneys of lab animals after only 90 days consumption, but everyday, Americans eat vast amounts of it as corn chips, corn flakes and other products. Genetically modified Soybeans have been linked to drops in male fertility, and the list of GM crops is gradually increasing as corporate farmers use ever larger quantities of various poisons to maintain yields.

The point being, in the end, they will have to Genetically modify us in order to allow us to eat all of this crap without dying.

What of collateral damage? Most wars have some of that. How about the honeybees, whose numbers are in rapid decline, and though a fungus and some viruses have been implicated in the decline, there are questions as to why the honeybee populations are succumbing to pathogens that have always been around. Pesticides are being mentioned more and more often as the culprit behind the Bee's inability to fight off these fatal disorders..

So the future looks grim, for both disease control using antibiotics and for human nutrition, as we gradually poison the food chain with genetically freaky plants we can't ingest without damage, and then there's the poor bees, losing the race to survive and losing the ability to help produce much of our food through pollination.

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