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Texas lawmaker says he's not worried about measles outbreak because of ‘antibiotics'
Texas state representative Bill Zedler says a resurgence of measles across the U.S. isn't worrying him.
Zedler, R-Arlington, is promoting legislation that would allow Texans to opt out of childhood vaccinations.
“They want to say people are dying of measles. Yeah, in Third World countries they’re dying of measles,” Zedler said, the Texas Observer reports. “Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.”
There is no treatment for measles, a highly contagious virus that can be fatal. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections and can't kill viruses.
It could be funny if it weren't so tragic.
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Texas Lawmaker not Worried about Measles because of ‘Antibiotics'
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:09PM (4 children)
I've been thinking that as life gets easier for an organism, the organism becomes less fit. No doubt someone has discovered and named this principle.
Saw a report on a scientific experiment in which flies were coddled so they didn't have to fly. In only a few generations, the flies degenerated to the point many of them were born with defective wings and could not fly.
This cuts more than one way. The anti-vaxxers have had life made so easy they can indulge this thinking, and not pay for it with the lives of their children. Or, inadvertently or purposefully, they're restoring their own fitness to survive measles by putting their kids through the disease. Don't need the brains to discern that the vaccine is the much better bet, if the consequences of choosing not to use it aren't that severe. And you can still win a poker too, by folding when you have a winning hand. Lot harder to win when you play like that, but not impossible.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:33PM (3 children)
This is a misunderstanding of the concept of fitness. The animal is only fit relative to their current environment. If flying around is not required for flies to reproduce then the flies that don't waste energy on this are fitter than those who do.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:35PM (2 children)
The key phrase is "current environment". What are the odds that a "current" environment will last a long enough time to make such quick genetic changes a good bet? Millions of years of flying, and then, just a few months of no flying required, and the flies responded that quickly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @03:00PM
A few months (~90 days) to a fly is like 270 years for humans with 30 year generation time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster#Lifecycle_and_reproduction [wikipedia.org]
And who said the population can't gain back the ability to fly as fast as they lost it?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 28 2019, @05:31PM
Yes. An example of this kind of evolutionary preference is the dodo, which started out at a kind of pigeon, but it got to an island where flying away was likely to get you drowned...or at least removed from the gene pool resident on the island. (Maybe you successfully made it back to the mainland, but you still were no longer ancestral to the remaining pigeons.) So the dodo lost the power of flight, as that made them more successful. Evolution has no foresight.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.