SuperBug !!
Scientists this past week declared that a bacteria was found in this country totally resistant to antibiotics. Great news if you’re an e-coli bacteria, not so good if you’re a human being. For decades we’ve treated chickens and pigs and turkeys and hypochondriac homo sapiens with antibiotics, giving out tetracycline and every other antibiotic like candy, never figuring the little bugs would adapt to this, despite the fact that they breed like … well, bacteria. In 1928 when Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin would kill the little buggers, it heralded in a new age of medicine.
Ninety years later, well, we got a brand new age of medicine. For almost a century we could control everything from staph to tuberculosis. Not bad for us humanoids. But the microscopic monsters were slowly working out defenses to our gigantic big brained discoveries. And now they’ve beaten us. We got a little complacent this time, and instead of using this miracle drug to cure diseases for us humans, we found we could make chickens grow big, salmon grow bigger and pigs grow to the size of tractor trailers. We could give patients the stuff when the doctors knew it wouldn’t do anything more than shut them up, a pill or two as placebo, maybe it would keep them from coming back when the viral infection ran its natural course. The pharmaceutical conglomerates sure didn’t mind.
We all grew up, I guess, thinking there was a pill for pretty much everything that ails us. We might’ve been alarmed when something like a flesh eating bacteria or HIV rolled in, some bug that we’d never imagined, something that would kill us for sure, our very own Black Plague. Course, we could always find a cure we figured. We could make a vaccine or discover a new antibiotic. Science, it’s on our side.
Now it looks like all bets are off. Unless you’re betting on the bugs. Or you were investing in Big Pharma stocks. Might be a good time to double down on health care stocks instead, not that being rich is gonna do us much good when the epidemics come….
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