The health bubble

While the world is paying attention to nuclear threats and terrorism, there’s another dangerous trend that only gets media attention once in a blue moon.

The latest example? Special resistant strains of Staph infection, carried by pigs. That evolution thing that a good number of US citizens don’t believe in is happening double time in the world of microscopic organisms, especially the kinds that kill humans.

We’ve enjoyed a period of relative calm in the age-long struggle against disease, largely because an incredibly smart human once scraped some stuff off of an orange and tried treating diseases with it.

We’ve been resting on that discovery and its derivatives for a long time, and not just for human health, either. We’ve also been using antibiotics on cows, which has the pleasant side effect of growing drug-resistant bacteria far more quickly than normal human use could do (might explain why all these resistant strains are popping up on farms…)

I think we are in a health bubble.

We are creating food and people at a rate which requires us to eat unhealthily[Image removed], at least unless you’re rich. We’re also using antibiotics to prop up both diseased human and diseased food. This is ultimately unsustainable.

I worry that the health bubble will pop. I don’t really want to be around for that.