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Dear Scooter,
I called you shortly before your show on Saturday. I wanted to talk about Intelligent Design but you got started on such a great rant about Cindy Sheehan and the George Bush boot lickers that I decided not to interrupt. I was enjoying your rant way too much.
I thought I would email you instead.
ID and creation scientist and their attack on the way science represent a huge health threat to you and all your listeners. There is a contagious condition spreading rapidly across our country today that can kill a matter of days, sometimes in hours, by devouring a person's body. It is like a super fast cancer. And it is totally out of control. Thousands of Americans are dying each year from this horror and the numbers are growing by the day. This horror is upon us as a direct result of the dual attack of Intelligent Design and its cousin Creation Science on the ability of the public to understand evolution. Virtually no evolutionary theory is taught in middle school or high schools any where in America today. Biology teachers are too afraid to mention the “E-word.”
The condition is multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. In the 1930's the son of an American president died from an infected blister. There was no treatment for infections. People were far more terrified of infections than cancer. Sinus infections ate away people's faces before those poor victims died in agony.
We are again at a time when there is no way to stop many infections. We are at the end of the era of antibiotics due to the complete inability of the American public to understand the basics of evolution. I have a nephew in law whose career as a deputy sheriff was ended by a resistant bacterial infection he acquired during surgery for an on the job injury. He has had two additional surgeries—losing 2/3 of one lung and then his spleen in the next operation to try to remove infected tissues. Even on IV antibiotics the best that can be done for him is to halt the spread of the infection not to kill it. He faces a third operation in the fall if he survives. It has been two years of hell for him, my niece and their two small children.
We use more antibiotics as daily growth promoters for chickens, pigs and cows than we do for all human and animal disease combined. Low levels of antibiotics are in the feed every single day for every single farm animal in America. If an evolutionary scientist was paid to come up with a method of developing antibiotic resistance, no better method than feeding low constant levels to farm animals could be conceived of. Today MRSA and other resistant bacteria are always found on the clothes and skin of workers in factory meat farms and routinely found on the clothes of their family members and friends and surfaces in their homes and cars.
Until 15 or twenty years ago these kinds of bacteria infections were incredibly rare. MRSA and other resistant bacteria might appear occasionally in hospitals. Huge expensive sterilization procedures (equipment replaced, all surfaces sterilized and painted over, bed linens burned, etc.) were put in place to eliminate them. In the nineties whole wings of hospitals were permanently shut down. But today no hospital even tries to stop the infections. The infections are completely out of control and ubiquitous in hospitals. All hospitals in the United States have MRSA and other resistant bacterial strains at all times in all parts of the hospitals. The only reason deaths have not yet been higher is most of these bacteria need a break in the skin to get started. And there is one dangerous IV antibiotic that usually kills the bacteria. But even this antibiotic is becoming useless. When it does work, side effects from the antibiotic are frequent and terrible.
In Europe the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals simply to promote growth is outlawed because Europeans teach and accept the principles of evolution. They as a public and their government agencies understand the dangers of soliciting drug resistance evolutionary adaptations to antibiotics.
If you haven’t been personally affected yet by antibiotic resistance, you will. At the current rate of spread, in less than five years every Americans will either personally have been a victim or someone close to them will be.
Do not think that new antibiotics will come on the seen. There have been no new antibiotics discovered since 1985. All the hundreds of “kinds” of antibiotics on the market are really slight variations of only five basic kinds (penicillin, cephalosporin, tetracycline, erythromycin, and quinolones). The differences among the hundreds of variations of these five kinds are tiny inert chemical side groups that allow big pharma to patent “new” antibiotics and increase profits. The new antibiotics are identical in efficacy to the old ones. The FDA which gets ¾ of its operating funds from big pharma continues to license these “me too” antibiotics as if they were “new” and more effective then the nearly identical ones they imitate.
Three of the existing five kinds of antibiotics are made from just one species of microbe (Streptomycetes). The search for new antibiotics has been known to be an almost hopeless search since the seventies. Antibiotics are kill bacteria but not mammals (like people) are exceedingly rare in nature. And resistance genes evolved by natural selection for one antibiotic usually gives resistance to other antibiotics.
Neither the CDC site or the NIH site (since W’s men took control of CDC and NIH) any longer mention antibiotics fed daily to farm animals as a problem (talk about censorship!), the following is an independent site (medscape) that is used by health care professionals in the United States for continuing education (CME) purposes:
www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410617 - 37k (posted in 2000, pre W)
Increasing prevalence of resistance to antibiotics has been recognized in microbial pathogens causing community-acquired and hospital-acquired infections. The most important factor responsible for the appearance and spread of antibiotic resistance has been increasing antibiotic use. Antibiotic supplementation of animal feed has contributed to the rise of some antibiotic resistance in community-acquired infections.
The site <
…the situation has now become alarming, with the emergence of pathogenic strains that show multiple resistance to a broad range of antibiotics. One of the most important examples concerns multiple-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus in hospitals (MRSA). Some of these strains cause serious nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections and are resistant to virtually all the useful antibiotics, including methicillin, cephalosporins and other beta-lactams that target peptidoglycan synthesis, the macrolide antibiotics such as erythromycin and the aminoglycoside antibiotics such as streptomycin and neomycin, all of which target the bacterial ribosome. The only compound that can be used effectively against these staphylococci is an older antibiotic, vancomycin, which has some undesirable effects on humans. Recently, some clinical strains of S. aureus have developed resistance to even this compound.
As bad as the above sounds the situation is worse in America. In the UK, antibiotic resistance is much better handled and more under control than here.
The thousands perhaps millions of deaths that will begin to take place routinely in the United States in the next few years can all be laid at the feet of ID and Creation Scientists. These anti-science charlatans have confused the public over this growing danger. We in the United States have not even begun to take steps to slow down the tremendous natural selection pressure towards resistance that feeding low levels of antibiotics to farm animals causes. The science charlatans have gotten rich and famous and have enormous power in the short term, but the long term consequences for them and the rest of us are extremely dire. The trends guarantee that in less than five years every individual American or his/her loved one will be tragically impacted by antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The majority of Americans have been successfully deceived by ID and Creation Science purveyors. Religious Americans have been told that accepting evolution means a rejection of their faith, of God himself. This is the first and greatest lie of the Anti-evolutionists. Once there target audience accepts this lie, the audience starts to accept all the other deceptions of ID and creation science as well.
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