Tag Archives: resistance
The new outdoors: mosquitoes and ticks oh my
Cross-posted from Island Press With more and more cases of Zika virus being reported, some experts are calling for the use of DDT to combat the mosquitoes that transmit it. We asked Emily Monosson, author of Unnatural Selection and Evolution in a Toxic World to weigh in on the proposed use of pesticides, and what else we can do to […]
Winter is Coming: the end of antibiotics?
Ok, so this is nothing new. We’ve been hearing about returning to the “pre-antibiotic” era for years now. So when I first heard the news news out of China, about resistance to polymyxin antibiotics (a resistance found in both food animals treated with the stuff, and patients hospitalized with infections) I wondered why all the fuss over […]
Rounding up Resistance
The other day a friend asked if it was true that the herbicide Roundup (or glyphosate) caused celiac disease. My knee-jerk response was that these days Roundup is blamed for everything from celiac to cancer. Adding that, as the top selling herbicide in part thanks to genetically modified crops (it was pretty lucrative before GMOs as well), it’s […]
Unnatural Interview with Salon.Com
Recently had the opportunity to chat with Lindsey Abrams of Salon.com about Unnatural Selection book. Here is an excerpt from that interview: Abrams: How much time passed between the time when humans began to have this outsized effect on other organisms, and when we began to really understand the implications of that, or even that […]
Antibiotics: lesson learned?
If you aren’t yet concerned about antibiotic resistance, you should be. With totally resistant TB and nearly resistant gonorrhea and certainly other incredibly resistant pathogens, the implications are clear: we are circling back toward the pre-antibiotic age. In today’s highly traveled and far more populated world, when infection can spread around the globe in a […]
Another one bites the dust, nature conquers bioengineering — again
And another one bites the dust. Corn rootworms, once the scourge of corn growers, stymied by corn engineered to produce Bt toxin (a crystalline toxin that basically pokes holes in the guts of these worms) are back. No matter how you feel about bioengineering, this is bad news because it can only lead to increased […]
Changing the world gene by gene
Here’s the skinny: evolution is happening all the time, all around us. Living things are like one roiling mass of DNA. OK, so that’s a little over the top. But DNA is far more dynamic than once believed, and our use of toxic chemicals — from antibiotics to pesticides — is making this abundantly clear. […]
