Resistance is Futile.
During this time of ghouls and ghastly racist costume choices, its never a bad idea to take stock of the fears that keep us up at night. You know, just to make sure theyre not hiding underneath the bed.
Lets see, zombies? Existentially terrifying but implausible. The gaping and crushing void of space? Only if youre Sandra Bullock. Clowns? Obviously macabre but almost certainly unionized into complacency.
Ooh, I got it! How about unthinking yet adaptive monsters wholly imperceptible to the human eye and able to render most every technological advance weve made in the past century useless? Yep. Thats a real one.
Last week, Spanish researchers Juan Jofre, Elisbet Marti and Jose Louis Balcazar, presumingly looking to win the Most Underwhelmingly Titled Study Ever award, released a paper called Prevalence of Antibiotic Resistance Genes and Bacterial Community Composition in a River Influenced by a Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Of course, what has now become the all-too-frightening reality of medicine is that bacterial diseases are exhibiting growing resistance to the antibiotics used to treat them; the natural outcome of overexposure to what we once thought as magic bullets. And while theres plenty of research done on the over-prescription of these drugs, relatively little has followed in the way of environmental contamination.
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http://www.grumblesandrumbles.com/2013/10/31/resistance-is-futile/