From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 11 2001 - 00:15:00 MDT
At 02:21 PM 8/11/01 +1000, I wrote:
>monocultural agribiz has reduced the
>genetic diversity of crops, making widespread variants especially
>vulnerable to the rebound diseases. That's not the fault of antibiotics
>*per se*, though.
I was sloppy, writing `agribiz' and `crops' when I mostly had livestock in
mind (and foolish medical over- prescription in humans, of course). But I
also vaguely had the notion of new innovations like gene-engineered plants
that would discriminate against pests, and conflated that with microbial
attack. Still, my point remains: `superbugs' aren't an especially virulent
novelty, just a reversion to how things were *before* we had the
`low-hanging fruit' off the metaphoric antibiotic tree, and wasted it
improvidently. Is that correct?
Damien Broderick
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