Gene Splicing Accelerates Evolution Of Pests

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Super-weeds and super-bugs are evolving very rapidly. When modern medicine first discovered penicillin, the race was on. When gene-splicing was perfected, Mother Nature matched us, gene for gene. Instead of racing ahead of her, she sprints ahead of our best efforts. This is the iron law of evolution: attempts at protecting ecological niches by suppressing other organisms that thrive in that niche leads to stronger invaders of said niche.

&hearts All living things evolve rapidly when attacked.

Herbicide-Resistant Weed Worries Farmers
By Elliott Minor
Associated Press, Dec 19, 2006
Straight to the Source

TIFTON, Ga. - The cotton industry is concerned about the discovery of a herbicide-resistant weed that spreads easily, can grow an inch a day even during droughts and could force farmers to return to older growing methods that were harsher on the environment.

"It is potentially the worse threat since the boll weevil," said Alan York, weed scientist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, referring to the voracious beetle that devastated Southern cotton crops in the early 1900s and forced farmers to switch to alternatives such as peanuts.

The boll weevil was eradicated in some states in the late 1970s and early 1980s, paving the way for the return of cotton as one of the nation's major crops, worth $4.7 billion. It is grown in 16 states from coast to coast.

The weed that is causing concern is Palmer amaranth, a type of pig weed that grows 6 to 10 feet tall. Amaranth that resists the most common herbicide used in cotton, glyphostate, has been confirmed in 10 of North Carolina's 100 counties, four of Georgia's 159 counties and is suspected in Tennessee, South Carolina and Arkansas, scientists say.

Humans evolved very rapidly during the Ice Ages because of climate instability. Diseases ravaged the Great Ape populations and a mega-volcanic eruption of Toba in Sumatra 74,000 years ago nearly annihilated our ancestors. We evolved big brains to deal with the many stresses of a harsh climate and uncertain world.

Today, we manipulate nature and humans are now one of the dominant bioforms on earth. Indeed, we utterly dominate nearly all ecosystems. Over the last 8,000 years, humans have figured out how to grow plants that benefit us and to tame and breed wild animals so they let us handle them and harvest them. The false evolutionary methods of domestication leaves a lot of genetic weakness in its wake. Namely, the harsh laws of nature means only the strong and healthy survive whereas we can protect and nurture even the very weak. The more knowledge we gain, the better we can protect the weak.

This means eliminating natural influences. For example, in agriculture, this means naming plants we don't want, 'weeds' and using various tools to prevent their growth since they always 'win' against the weaker plants we wish to nurture. Plowing and weeding is the manual way of eliminating weeds, for example.

Insects are more difficult to suppress. In the past, humans simply lived with the fact that insects would share our bounties and we just had to plant enough for both humans and insects. The Green Revolution brought by modern science was supposed to end this bargain with nature. We were going to colonize the planet with things we wanted rather than with what Nature desired.

Every stratagem we devise, it takes Nature less than 20 years to circumvent or overturn. The more severe we challenge her rule, the quicker she defeats us on the battlefield of life. When we speed up the Wheel of Evolution, she simply accelerates alongside us. Philosophically unable to accept this reality, we dream of greater evolutionary feats, gene splicing more and more.

Our frankensteinian creations, far from triumphing, end up captured by the weeds and wild things, making them heroically stronger. This is particularly true with the oldest living phylums and their armies of single cell foot soldiers: germs and bacteria.

&hearts I have grown organic food all my life.

(From a web site run by the agra-industry) Antibiotics are used to treat, control and prevent diseases, as well as to maintain the health of animals. They help farmers protect the whole herd or flock to ensure food safety.

Because farm animals are raised in groups, one sick animal exposes the others to illness. Antibiotics are used to treat the sick animals and also to prevent and control the spread of disease within the herd or flock. Lower amounts of antibiotics are needed to prevent and control disease than for treatment.

They also help ensure safe meat, milk and eggs. Good farm management programs that include using antibiotics reduce the amount of disease-causing bacteria that could get into the food supply.

I have lectured about chicken eggs all my life, since childhood. I am a firm believer in 'happy chickens=good eggs' school of thought. My hens have a large multi-level, multi-environment pen complex. There are outside runs, inside runs and the nesting areas with a smaller, interior room for cold winter nights. Stressed out animals get sick. The more they are stressed out, the sicker they get. Humans are the same, by the way.

This is why the news that more humans are now moving into very crowded, stressful mega-slums is very disheartening.

Back to eggs: we are now warned to not eat raw eggs because we might get sick thanks to germs inside the eggs! Well, my hens, like all birds, lay eggs with a fine film coating them which protects the yolk from germs! I don't wash this off until I consume the eggs. Commercial eggs are cleaned immediately.

One can tell by touching the eggs. A natural egg is smooth and slippery. A washed egg, especially washed in chemicals, has a coarse surface and air passes right into it including any stray germs. And germs love to stray!

Like weeds growing hooks to their seeds can snag a dog's fur and travel many miles this way before being pulled off! Germs, being half a billion years old, at least, are old hands at spreading themselves and surviving. Humans and the biosystems we have erected for ourselves are just so much biomass to exploit as far as they are concerned.

Feeding livestock antibiotics regularly is playing with fire. Instead of making herds of sheep healthier, it allows us to raise weaker and weaker sheep. Instead of strong, healthy cows, they are pumped up with medicines and then milked ruthlessly even while very ill. Yuck. People consume sick chickens, sick pigs, sick cows, now that fish are farmed, they are sick, too!

Not only are we eating a lot of sick food, we are creating powerful germs that spread from our animals we raise to us. This is what the bird flu is all about, just for example.

Making farm animals sicker and weaker won't save us. Killing all chickens and ducks won't stop the germs for the flu from continuing to evolve, indeed, it just might speed it up for whenever we deliberately turn the Wheel of Evolution, Nature accelerates her own cart and passes us by.

&hearts And this is very dangerous for us, supergerms are now evolving quite rapidly.

Kerry Fehr-Snyder
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 19, 2006 12:00 AM

Supergerms that resist antibiotics are spreading in Arizona, sickening some patients for months and prompting health officials to step up prevention efforts.

Doctors are urging patients to take extra precautions against spreading hard-to-treat infections, especially staph infections that break out in the skin but can spread to other parts of the body.

Years ago, very old people died fairly swiftly. Hardy people who had the right genes, lived merrily until extreme old age and then they left swiftly, too. Lingering deaths of the very elderly was virtually unknown. Children died swiftly too. So many, out of a family of seven children, perhaps only three might survive early childhood.

Victorians recognized this. Mrs. Beeton, in her book on running a household, cautioned young mothers to brace themselves for losing children and assuring them, the survivors would be hale and hearty and it was unwise to waste too many tears for the lost ones.

Today, we try to keep everyone alive. To do this, we need to use antibiotics. This is why the abuse of this medicine as a shortcut for farmers is criminal. I said back in the mid 1960's when I used to debate farming methods (as a teenager, no less) with aggie graduates at the University of Arizona, using medicines will destroy all humanity unless we accept the rules of Nature and not try to suppress all germs all the time.

Alas, few people listened to me or any of the small army of organic farm theorists. So today, we have very bad news:

The king of the bad bugs worrying infectious-disease doctors is MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureas. Although staph infections are common - the bacteria live inside many people's noses - antibiotic-resistant strains are multiplying. MRSA symptoms can range from skin boils to necrotizing fasciitis, also known as flesh-eating bacteria.

Thanks to antibiotics, hospitals trained in Victorian methods of cleanliness got careless. Now these places are the hot spot for terrible infections that few medicines can cure. They started in the wards for the elderly. Old people can't fend off diseases very well so medicines have been used heavily to eke out a few more months or hours.

Fear of death motivates people to expend any and all methods to kill germs and prevent infections. But by doing this, we simply accelerated the evolution of germs which, like vultures, are attracted by the unhealthy and move in no matter how hard we try to bar the door. The technology saving premature babies worked at the other end of the spectrum. Since these people are concentrated in large buildings in fairly large numbers, this made hospitals the perfect place for germs to evolve and spread.

&hearts Wars spread diseases which is why the Four Horsemen do not ride alone but in a quartet of death.

MRSA and Iraq
Started by Amy Posted: August 21, 2006

I am a 33 y/o female in Washington state dealing with MRSA.

My fiance (healthy 34 y/o guy) developed mrsa while he was in Iraq. Nothing really popped up again until November of 2005. He was treated w/antibiotics and had the boil drained. In February of 2006 I developed a boil under my arm, had it drained and received antibiotics. Since then both of us have developed a boil at least once a month. Presently he has one in his groin area and I have one inside of my vagina.

When America pushed the sanctions against Iraq, we sowed the seeds of death which our soldiers are bringing home. This is true of Gaza and the West Bank. The Jewish people imagine they will inoculate themselves against what they are creating: by maliciously destroying the health of the Palestinian people, not only will they die but the diseases generated will spread, there is no way around this equation! The teeming slums surrounding most of earth's mega-cities are host to an army of diseases which will conquer even the very wealthy. Readers of Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death' know what happens next.

&hearts Here are many heartbreaking stories of this terrible new disease.

&hearts Biologists are increasingly worried about this swift evolution of single celled creatures.

© 2006 Kenneth Todar University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Bacteriology

Disease-causing microbes that have become resistant to antibiotic drug therapy are an increasing public health problem. Tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and childhood ear infections are just a few of the diseases that have become hard to treat with antibiotics. Part of the problem is that bacteria and other microbes that cause infections are remarkably resilient and have developed several ways to resist antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs. However, a larger part of the problem is due to our increasing use, and misuse, of existing antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine and in agriculture,

About 70 percent of the bacteria that cause infections in hospitals are now resistant to at least one of the drugs most commonly used for treatment. Some organisms are resistant to all approved antibiotics and can only be treated with experimental and potentially toxic drugs. An alarming increase in resistance of bacteria that cause community acquired infections has also been documented, especially in the staphylococci and pneumococci (Streptococcus pneumoniae), which are prevalent causes of disease and mortality.

Up until recently, doctors and nurses worked in hospitals, secure in the knowledge, they had little to fear. I once nearly died of a disease I caught from a Vietnam war vet who just came back out of the jungles, he was a Marine who collapsed in the street and I gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation until he was taken in an ambulance. I, the doctor and two nurses who interacted with him, nearly died. I had a 105 degree temperature for more than 12 hours and suffered some mostly temporary brain damage from it.

There was nothing to do but stay in isolation until past the infectious stage. Afterwards, I decided to study the Black Plague and other epidemics. This is why I came to the sorrowful conclusion that we need to let evolution work on human and domestic farm populations just like it does in nature, to enough a degree to keep super-bugs from forming. AIDS has greatly accelerated the evolution of germs because it weakens the immuno-systems and thus, provides a petri dish for any and all germs. The more we treat AIDS, the faster these germs evolve. This is true of cancer treatments, too. Unless we can devise inoculations that prevent germs like we did with small pox, we have to accept the reality of germs evolving faster than we can find cures for them.

Many of our present cures for conditions afflicting us involve suppressing germs using drugs. And this is at best, a holding pattern. The unhappy part is, the germs become more deadly which means, when we lose the race, we might go extinct.

Another cheerful thought while thinking about the possibility of nuclear war. I suppose this is giving everyone a happy new year. Well, I always felt that pretending something isn't happening doesn't stop it from turning everything upside down! We might as well bite the bullet and face the facts. Getting along with Nature may be painful and it might fill us with sorrow but that is how She works.

None of us will live forever. To make our time on earth worthy is the task that faces us. And part of that is to love life and accept even the pain that is part of life.

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Comments

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

No sooner do I post a story which mentions the new super-bug, MRSA, than it makes the news online tonight!

http://www.canada.com/gobaltv/national/story.html?id=5cb8cfd3-dacd-4c56-aea0-22bda6f1cf91&p=2

Supergerm spreading rapidly in Canada

A superbug that causes infections from large, boil-like lesions to hemorrhagic pneumonia and, in rare cases, flesh-eating disease is poised to "emerge in force" across Canada, a new report warns.

While the prospect of a flu pandemic has governments scrambling to develop emergency plans, an epidemic of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or CA-MRSA, is raging in the U.S. and beginning to entrench itself here, infectious disease experts report today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

*snip*

New Canadian guidelines to control MRSA recommend regular hand washing, covering any draining skin lesion and not sharing potentially contaminated personal articles. Doctors are urged to report suspected outbreak to public health authorities and to limit the use of antibiotics, because their over-use drives resistance.

A vain attempt at closing the barn door long after the four horses of the Apocalpyse have galloped away.

[mark abbott]

Well, now we know why the Cheneys are so keen on hand sanitizer!

I'm told the feeling among many First Peoples/Native Americans is that the Earth is trying to (at best) bring us to heel or (at worst) shrug us off Her. And She's got just the chops to do it!

[blues]

I have been telling people for years that we absolutely must eliminate the giant concrete pyramids to 'medical science' that we call hospitals, and replace them with temporary wooden structures that we can burn down every other year. That is the only possible way to get rid of some of the germs.

And I have been insisting that all civilian aviation must be outlawed. If there was a smallpox outbreak, we would have no more than three days to shut it all down. So why wait for that?

And, by the way, the only real winners in any war are, you guessed it, germs.

I once made a pilgrimage to the UMass department of biochemistry to officially inform them that they were completely insane. I wonder if that little footnote lingers somewhere in their archives.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Sort of 'Germs of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your host's biomass'?

[JSmith]

Here's an interesting link for all you pessimists who think it's all going straight to hell. Happy reading!

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I went there, Smith. What a MESSY site. Gads. Couldn't they redesign it a tad to make it look better and work better? It was also very repetitious. And jamming all the names, one after another, in a big box?

GAHHHH. Embarrassing. One would think a bunch of geniuses could do better.

Seriously, it is a big site that has been around forever and it is a victim of its age, namely, it doesn't keep up with latest trends in computer interfacing. Do note all the major media updates their sites regularily. They change a lot over the years. In two years, my site has changed and continues to evolve.

Anyone talking about futuristic stuff and technology should be braver about changing themselves. So many techie sites have this same problem. I feel like I am in a time machine when I visit them.

[JSmith]

"What a MESSY site."

I couldn't agree more.

That having been said... did you read any of it?

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[Jake Martin]

Well basically found this site while I was comparing and contrasting different Homo Erectus skulls that could be found on google images. My eye really caught the image this site used to represent a "Homo Erectus" for it looked very primitive to be labeled as Erectus. In reality it is way too morphologically similar to Homo Habilis skulls just by glancing at it with this simple picture. Homo Habilis is the commonly believed ancestor to erectus. I think it can be even read at the bottom right of the jaw that it is even in fact labeled "Homo Habilis"!