Creating Disease: Pollution, Mutation, Adaptation and Evolution

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Industry has polluted our world, and changed it - down to the molecular level. Now, the microbes that populate our planet are mutating, adapting to the changes we have created, and evolving - much more quickly and successfully than we are.

For example, scientists say killer viruses are not born - they are made - and agricultural industries like livestock operations are creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria too.

Avian Influenza: Flu Factories

In our efforts to streamline farming practices to produce more meat for more people, we have inadvertently created conditions by which a harmless parasite of wild ducks can be converted into a lethal killer of humans.

- Johns Hopkins University neurovirologist R.H. Yolken and Stanley Medical Research Institute director E.F. Torrey.

How does naturally occurring, innocuous waterfowl flu mutate into virulent, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)?

According to the World Health Organization's 2005 assessment of the pandemic threat, HPAI viruses aren't born, they're made. "Highly pathogenic viruses have no natural reservoir. Instead, they emerge by mutation when a virus, carried in its mild form by a wild bird, is introduced to poultry. Once in poultry, the previously stable virus begins to evolve rapidly, and can mutate, over an unpredictable period of time, into a highly lethal version of the same initially mild strain." Scientists have demonstrated this transformation in a laboratory setting.

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Scientists find threat in livestock feedlots

Growing so large that they are now called "factory farms," livestock feedlots are poorly regulated, pose health and ecological dangers and are responsible for a deteriorating quality of life in America's and Europe's farm regions, according to a series of studies published this week by scientists.

Animal feedlots are contaminating water supplies with pathogens and chemicals, and polluting the air with foul-smelling compounds that can cause respiratory problems, but the health of their neighbors goes largely unmonitored, the reports concluded.

The international teams of environmental scientists also warned that the livestock operations are contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant germs, and the proximity of poultry and hogs could hasten the spread of avian flu to humans.

But international corporate industry does NOT want people to know how serious the situation really is - so they finance pseudoscientific "debates" to question the science.

See:

The Denial Industry

Financing Pseudoscience: Intelligent Design and the Evolution "Debate."

Backgrounds of Global Warming Skeptics


This thread will review the scientific evidence showing that industrial pollution and man-made contaminants are destroying the earth's biosphere - and so, creating human epidemics, and causing animal extinctions.


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Lots of doom and gloom but so what - are non-furry, ugly bugs more or less important than humans..?? All creatures on this planet exploit their environment to the fullest - in some cases causing harm to others. Most humans get their panties wound in a bunch because it hurts something cute and cuddly but forget that there are a whole host of not so cute and cuddly things that can and will fill in any voids.

A perfect example - Exxon Valdez. Nasty spill, all sorts of lovely cute things got harmed. But this spill also provided a bounty to many not so cute little beasties. Which is more important in the long run - cute and cuddly or not so cute an cuddly?? I know, we "humans" caused it and that is bad, but the outcome is what I'm getting at - which is better or more deserving of our help, care and feeding in the grand scheme of things..??

I'm on the fence, but I ask that people take a hard look at their arguments in this debate and try to toss the anthropomorphism bit out of it - it is very difficult, as we grow up with cute and cuddly (not many people with pond scum as pets)....

Also, since I was a bio guy - note that this ball of dirt we call earth is a wonderful, self regulating system. Any thing we can do to an ecosystem, mother nature can outdo or undo in short order. Other creatures are far better at expoliting things than we are - are they any less deserving of a chance to win out and succeed than us..??

Originally posted by UofCinLA

I'm on the fence, but I ask that people take a hard look at their arguments in this debate

What debate might that be?

Also, since I was a bio guy - note that this ball of dirt we call earth is a wonderful, self regulating system. Any thing we can do to an ecosystem, mother nature can outdo or undo in short order. Other creatures are far better at expoliting things than we are - are they any less deserving of a chance to win out and succeed than us..??

So you're saying that it's perfectly okay to trash the earth and make it unhabitable to humans and other animals? Because mother nature will find a way, and some microbial lifeform or another will flourish?

If you're a "bio guy," then you know that we are creating crises that soon we will NOT be able to manage - in fact, we're pretty pressed right now, and can't cure or treat the majority of diseases we already have created.

Don't you think we should take action before it's too late?

Here's another snippet from my files:

Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response

Microbes live in every conceivable ecological niche on the planet and have inhabited the earth for many hundreds of millions of years. Indeed, microbes may be the most abundant life form by mass, and they are highly adaptable to external forces. The vast majority of microbes are essential to human, animal, and plant life. Occasionally, however, a microbe is identified as a pathogen because it causes an acute infectious disease or triggers a pathway to chronic diseases, including some cancers. Certainly, humankind remains ignorant of the full scope of diseases caused by microbial threats, as only a small portion of all microbes have been identified by currently available technologies. ...Microbial threats continue to emerge, reemerge, and persist. Some microbes cause newly recognized diseases in humans; others are previously known pathogens that are infecting new or larger population groups or spreading into new geographic areas.

The emergence and spread of microbial threats are driven by a complex set of factors, the convergence of which can lead to consequences of disease much greater than any single factor might suggest. Genetic and biological factors allow microbes to adapt and change, and can make humans more or less susceptible to infections. Changes in the physical environment can impact on the ecology of vectors and animal reservoirs, the transmissibility of microbes, and the activities of humans that expose them to certain threats. Human behavior, both individual and collective, is perhaps the most complex factor in the emergence of disease. Emergence is especially complicated by social, political, and economic factors—including the development of megacities, the disruption of global ecosystems, the expansion of international travel and commerce, and poverty—which ensure that infectious diseases will continue to plague us.

...Infectious diseases have emerged as a direct result of changes in technology and industry. Advances in medical technologies, such as blood transfusions, human organ and tissue transplants, and xenotransplantation (using an animal source), have created new pathways for the spread of certain infections. Even the manner in which animals are raised as food products, such as the use of antimicrobials for growth production, has abetted the rise in infectious diseases by contributing to antimicrobial resistance.

RE: your charge of "doom and gloom."

IMO - it's just good common sense to pay attention, and take care of business.

To coin a phrase: There are no problems, only solutions.




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My point is that we are not the only life form on this planet, and while we can do many things to "harm" things, we do so from "our" perspective. There are lots of other things that love it when we screw up and who are we to say that such an event is "bad" in a global sense..??

I would point to simple observations for how well nature takes care of things - go find an abondoned building or better yet city - nature takes over our failures in short order and re-exploits things quite well.

CO2 is a fun one too - what if the normal cycle to global CO2 changes is on the order of 20-50 years to rebalance (more CO2, more plants will be happy - takes some time for more plants to grow, etc.). That means that while we are continuing to increase things maybe nature will deal with it in time. Problem is we do not know - this is a dynamic and open system we live in, and we've only been around to study it for ~100 years. Things often take timescales longer than one human generation to work themselves out.... I also like how people point to global CO2 release from volcanoes at being ~100-150 time LESS than human CO2 output. Problem here is that CO2 is also released from sea water, ice, animals and the ground and there is no way to easily quantify that nor to quanitfy that in relation to geologic events over the long term. CO2 is high now, but it has been high in the past as well when no humans were around to futz with the system. Large scale fires reduce trees, increase CO2, etc....

Not saying what we do is not bad, but the bottom line is the earth and nature is a dynamic system - a very dynamic system and that it is very selfish to say that we jumans are the only thing of importance (or our cute furry friends)....

Originally posted by UofCinLA

Not saying what we do is not bad, but the bottom line is the earth and nature is a dynamic system - a very dynamic system and that it is very selfish to say that we jumans are the only thing of importance (or our cute furry friends)....

I agree with you.

Yeah dynamic system.

But my points are:

* We have created a world that we cannot survive in.

* We can still save the planet - as a home for ourselves, not just interesting microbes - IF we change our ways, and clean up our messes.

* BUT we need to understand the problem before we see the solution - and many forces are in play that prevent us from clearly identifying the problem.


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Closing some files here - thought I'd post this bit. Helps explain part of the process of human mutation, (and hopefully) adaptation and evolution...

One part of the process: How chemicals can speed up evolution

THE mystery of how human DNA evolves during someone's lifetime looks a step closer to being solved.

Researchers in Japan have found evidence that environmental agents that cause chemical changes to our DNA throughout life may increase the amount of shuffling and mutation that occurs within our DNA during the formation of egg and sperm cells. So exposure of our DNA to reactive chemicals may actually drive evolution by promoting genetic diversity in our children.

Yusaku Nakabeppu and his colleagues at Kyushu University in Fukuoka have shown that, if unrepaired by enzymes, a type of chemical damage called oxidation can reshuffle DNA's four basic building blocks - adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine.

More file clean-up...

Some mutations are adaptive, but some lead to disease. Drug therapies often tend to create more mutations so scientists have been looking for other alternatives. One of the most promising alternatives is stem cell therapy.

New Treatment Shows 'unambiguous' Benefits

The study involved injecting the stem cells into golden retriever dogs with a condition that closely mimics Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The cells integrated into damaged muscle tissue and, in some cases, led to impressive improvements in the animals' walking ability.

"This is the most dramatic example that stem cells really have a lot of potential to regenerate damaged or diseased tissues," said Jeffrey Chamberlain at the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine in the University of Washington. He was not involved in the work. "There's been a lot of interest in applying stem cells to treating diseases, but so far that's been mainly theoretical. There haven't been any good examples of the success of that strategy."

Scientists believe that stem cells hold great promise in medicine because they are able become a variety of other cells and so could be used to rebuild damaged tissue.

At the same time, biotechnology is a great concern:

U.N. Leader Urges Biotech Safeguards

Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations warned Saturday that the potential for danger from the rapidly growing biotechnology industry was increasing exponentially and urged creating global safeguards.

“We lack an international system of safeguards to manage those risks,” he said. “Scientists may do their best to follow rules for responsible conduct of research. But efforts to harmonize these rules on a global level are outpaced by the galloping advance of science itself.”

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[edit on 28-11-2006 by soficrow]

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Mutations in DNA - genetic mutations - are behind many, if not most, modern diseases. But the mechanisms have been elusive - especially since discovering that the human genome has far fewer genes than expected.

Now, researchers find that more genes than they thought have multiple copies of themselves - some with disease-causing mutations. This variance in the number of gene copies could hold clues to disease that were missed before now.

Multi-Copy DNA More Common Than Thought

It appears that many more genes than once thought have multiple copies of themselves, called "copy-number variants" - some of which may contain disease-causing mutations, researchers report. ...This type of mutation has often been overlooked as a cause of genetic disease, the researchers add. What proportion of genetic disease is caused by copy-number variation isn't known but experts believe that it is significant.

To find out more, they have developed a DNA map of gene segments. ...Scherer's group made the map by analyzing DNA from 270 individuals from four populations from Europe, Africa or Asia. The team found over 1,447 copy-number variants, covering 12 percent of the human genome. This means that copy-number variants are much more common than has been thought.

Copy-number variants can influence gene expression and phenotype (the way genes play out in appearance or behavior) and can cause disease. So, unless they are analyzed directly, they could be missed by the current strategies that experts use to identify DNA mutations in genetic diseases. ...Based on this finding, researchers may need to go back and look again at genes involved in diseases, Scherer said. "We are going to find tens of thousands of these differences," he said.

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Thank you sofi, for this important information. I'm surprised not many people have replied. This is a vital topic that should be well known. ~7% of all humans to have roamed the earth are alive today! Transcontinental flights & pollution have turned evolutionary theory upside down! We're evolving at such high rates as of late, nobody is able to keep up with it all!

Keep up the great work. Perhaps together we at ATS can put some pieces together, in hopes of surviving the many mutations taking place on this planet at every which level...

Originally posted by unityemissions
Thank you sofi, for this important information. I'm surprised not many people have replied.

...They think my real name is Cassandra. But thank you.

This is a vital topic that should be well known.

It will be, shortly. Or explained away as a single-event conspiracy, or mystical intervention.

Perhaps together we at ATS can put some pieces together,

Your contributions are GREAT!

in hopes of surviving the many mutations taking place on this planet at every which level...

FYI - exposure levels count. So minimize those exposures! ...Total avoidance on the other hand, only works for a while, then tends to fail rather profoundly.

So human activity - the extension of the human phenotype - is affecting the environment, causing adaptation problems for species but also promoting a higher rate of mutation and hence evolution.

So what?

Sounds like just another day on Planet Earth.

What's the big deal if the environment changes? What's the big deal, even, with another Great Dying? Earth has seen their like before - in the Cambrian, the Cretaceous and preeminently in the Permian.

Life on Earth will not be wiped out. Of that we can be sure.

Oh yes, human beings will have a torrid time of it. If any survive, they will be a tiny, well-protected (read well-adapted) handful. Of badasses.

I really don't see what problem you have with all this. It's just evolution going its merry way. No need to get all excited and doomy about it...

Originally posted by Astyanax

What's the big deal if the environment changes? What's the big deal, even, with another Great Dying?

I like to try to understand my world, my life. And share what I learn. ...The "big deal" is knowledge.

Oh yes, human beings will have a torrid time of it. If any survive, they will be a tiny, well-protected (read well-adapted) handful. Of badasses.

Not all survivors will be badasses. And effort is required to ensure that true knowledge - the software- survives with that handful. The hard-wired truths are subject to much erroneous re-interpretation, and thus, unreliable. So the wheel goes round and round, and the badasses keep all the cards - unless the effort is made...

I really don't see what problem you have with all this. It's just evolution going its merry way. No need to get all excited and doomy about it...

I find the process of acquiring knowledge, and the 'products,' to be incredibly exciting. But no, I tend not to have a 'doomy' emotional reaction - more a no-ego Zen awareness, and a Sufi-like commitment to assisting individual and cultural development.

Why do YOU consider it "doomy"?

Another good thread from you friend!
Keep it up.

S&F

-Zyk

We the human race has survived in this earth longer than any other species before us, if we are to follow the examples of other species that are extinct, we humans should have fallen into that fate long time ago.

But we think we are smarter, special, Created by divine intervention to dominate earth and anything in earth.

What many people doesn't understand is that we will be the ones that will exterminate our own species because we think ourselves invincible.

Since man has taken the task to dominate nature we are in a constant battle for supremacy eventually nature will win and we will be relegated to nothing but another extinct species to be replaced by another one.

The damage that the so call Super crops are doing to the environment is just incredible, but people doesn't get to see it for themselves because the media is not interested.

I have been following the GMO and Monsanto for a while and now their super crops are creating super weeds and within those super weeds we are to find the super bugs.

This industrial monster is tampering our food supply with human hormones to create bigger and the so call better food supply, even our sea food is not off limits to this monsters, no wonder we are becoming so susceptible to animal diseases now.

But the government will never agree with any of this because profits are over human life.

Originally posted by marg6043

The damage that the so call Super crops are doing to the environment is just incredible, but people doesn't get to see it for themselves because the media is not interested.

I have been following the GMO and Monsanto for a while and now their super crops are creating super weeds and within those super weeds we are to find the super bugs.

An incredibly important factor here.

Monsanto has released genetically modified organisms into our environment. ...But we think they are somehow independent, NOT part of the system, NOT going to interact with other components, and NOT going to influence the system in any way?

Duh.

This industrial monster is tampering our food supply with human hormones to create bigger and the so call better food supply, even our sea food is not off limits to this monsters, no wonder we are becoming so susceptible to animal diseases now.

Yep. And more.

But the government will never agree with any of this because profits are over human life.

No, the government won't even touch it. Because 'profits over people' is written into corporate LAW. Putting people before profit is illegal.

Originally posted by marg6043
We the human race has survived in this earth longer than any other species before us, if we are to follow the examples of other species that are extinct, we humans should have fallen into that fate long time ago.

Utter nonsense. What makes you think Homo sapiens has survived the longest?

Anyways what's killing the current biosphere is consumerism. Story of stuff, watch it..

[edit on 28-5-2009 by rhinoceros]

Originally posted by rhinoceros

Anyways what's killing the current biosphere is consumerism. Story of stuff, watch it..

GREAT link.

But don't forget, our handlers are the ones who defined us as 'consumers' and market that identity to us in schools, the media, through government...

Did you know? ...Officially, people used to be written about as 'voters' or 'citizens' - but that changed. Most official documents now refer to people as 'consumers.'

Where did that come from, do you think?

reply to post by soficrow


It's the jews. It's always the jews

No, really it's corporations that took over governments. According to that vid I posted a link to 51 of the largest 100 economies are now corporations. Consumerism and capitalism are evil..

reply to post by rhinoceros


Why? because we have been indoctrinated that we dominate earth and everything in earth? that we are "special" and of divine creation?

See, we are the only species in earth that have reasoning and free will and while other species before us were happy with their environment and be part of that environment that provided sustenance and protection, we humans "think" that we can manipulate that environment to for our own greedy benefit.

America consumerism and the exploitation of it is what has caused the economic crisis we are having right now.

So yes we are nothing but consumers and as consumers we are nothing but a parasite and a virus to our own environment.

Guess what nature do to take care of what is not productive in nature, it eliminates it.

BTW, you are right we are one the youngest species in earth but so far we have done more damage and any other species before us.