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Amazing Animals
Cock-a-doodle-doo - Building the Super Bug, One Chicken at a Time
In the September 2007 edition of the evolutionist magazine Discover is an article on how chicken farms are inadvertently producing super bugs, bacteria that are impervious to antibiotics. An estimated 70 percent of the 24 million pounds of antibiotics used in the United States are used on farms, mostly on animals. Chicken farmers use them because they believe it will help to fatten up the birds and increase their profits. But as with so many things that are done in this world, there are unintended consequences to their actions.
The FDA estimates are that about 70 percent of all infection-causing bacteria have become resistant to at least one type of commonly used antibiotics. Some bacteria have even become resistant to all currently used antibiotics. Unfortunately the situation is going from bad to worse, because bacteria are capable of sharing DNA and can therefore share antibiotic resistant and that’s how the superbug is being made.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this growing public health disaster is that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that these antibiotics aren’t even helping to make fatter chickens. What happened was that research done in the 1950’s seemed to indicate that chickens fed antibiotics gained more weight. Later research that showed that antibiotics did not help weight gain was ignored. The chicken antibiotic fiasco is a combination of bad science and bad business decisions that are creating a ticking public health timebomb that could someday blow up in any one of our faces if we become infected with one of these super bugs. This whole situation is also a rather glaring example of how an ingrained thought pattern can shut down critical thinking.
Science is a very human activity with all of the good and bad that that implies. The overuse of antibiotics that are producing unstoppable infections is the result of having an idea, antibiotics making bigger chickens, rise to the level of no longer being open to new information. The unquestioned promotion of the religion of evolutionism by the scientific establishment is also producing societal decay that may become unstoppable.
