Is This How Nature Will Clear The Planet And Start Again?

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36321394
We tend to think that we will induce our own Armageddon but nature has its own ways of cleaning the earth. Is human kind coming to the end of its tenure? I tend to think that science will in the end find and answer but this is a difficult issue.

[andy-hughes]

File this under 'bird flu / nuclear attack / SARS / death of bees / communism ....' blah blah.

The press like to lob these Armageddon prophesies into the mix every now and again.

It's supposition, and scare-mongering, and does not deserve house room.

[Old_Geezer]

Not this way. At worst we simply go back to the day before antibiotics, at best we uncover a new way to kill them off. Last I read, IBM had found a promising area which is common to all viruses and which could potentially be used to get rid of them.

Personally I feel limited resources, over-breeding, and the arising conflict/famine/etc.. is a much more worrying concern. Especially if it continues to cause further climate change, screwing up the sea levels and weather etc..

[ToraToraTora]

don't dismiss so readily Andy, there is an arms race going on with bacteria, it is a fact that resistant strains are emerging all the time, it is also true that we are popping anti biotics like smarties and subduing our own immune systems.

[fiction-factory]

I agree andy- I must have spent hundreds of hours at work sitting on committees looking at contingency planning for bird flu.

[andy-hughes]

I think we are programmed as a race to have the occasional 'We're doomed!' moments, and the media like to poke the bear with them.

[ToraToraTora]

imagine if an ebola type bacteria gets airborne...

[sevenOP]

Could be a timely joint venture:bugs +
https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2016/05/10/5_9_16_Andrea_TempSpiralEdHawkins.gif

[jno]

I'd be dead if it wasn't for antibiotics; so I share the concerns over this. The human race didn't die out before antibiotics, but it didn't live nearly as long.

[sandyRoe]

Before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs they must have thought the future belonged to them.

[pixie374]

I think it's much more likely than it sounds. It isn't so much antibiotics suppressing the immune system, it's more that people don't take them properly, stop while infection is still there and the remaining bacteria mutate and become immune to treatment. So they become more and more dangerous as well. I know a couple of doctors who have been saying this for years and think it's being very underestimated.

[youngmafbog]

Nature will clear the planet at some point, probably by some disease.

And it will be because of the doubters like Andy. Whilst I have some sympathy with Andy's views you never know until it is over how bad it could get. Complacency will be the killer as much as the disease.

[New Judge]

Mr Cameron is visiting a drainpipe factory in Staffordshire later today. He will tell the assembled workforce that it is not antibiotics we have to thank for keeping the continent relatively free of infection and disease for the past 60 years. It is only the European Union that has provided protection against such catastrophes. Should the nation be foolish enough to leave the EU it can expect an outbreak of a virulent disease resistant to all antibiotics to occur within a week and the entire population will be wiped out within six weeks of leaving.

Of course regular readers will know I’m prone to distort the truth and exaggerate when discussing the EU, so I’ll come clean. It’s not a drainpipe factory he’s visiting but a metal recycling plant.

[Bazile]

oh come come , now .

We all know that global warming will cause the final extinction of the human race

[New Judge]

Not so long as we remain in the EU, it won't, baz! :-)