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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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(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.