In today’s scientific livestock industry, cattle are often given antibiotics. Not as medicine but “to fatten them up.” Apparently the drugs kill beneficent bacteria in the animal’s digestive system that causes them to put on weight. Now the light has dawned in the minds of some medical researchers. Could the heavy use of antibiotics among human beings be a factor in our obesity problems? Are we fattening ourselves up like drugged cattle in a feed lot? See Early use of antibiotics linked to obesity, research finds – The Washington Post.
In other antibiotic news, a “superbug
“–a strain of bacteria completely resistant to all known antibiotics killed six people at the National Institute of Health’s Clinical Center. The linked article estimates that 6% of American hospitals are infested with this thing. (This doesn’t seem to be a case of what scientists have been worried about, bacteria that have developed a resistance to antibiotics because of their overuse and evolved into something that cannot be killed. [That wouldn’t be evolution, by the way, just natural selection, which I don’t think anyone denies. Faster animals outrun predators, animals adapt, and the fittest do survive. What Darwin did was insist that natural selection eventually turns one species into another.] Anyway, this superbug is normally one of those friendly bacteria that inhabits our bodies, but when a person’s immune system goes wrong, it turns into a monster.
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