Literature: off the Synsorb topic. Book review! --------beginning of incoherent rant-------------------------- :-) Fiction sometimes predicts reality. After finishing a novel (Third Pandemic, by Pierre Ouelette, Pocket Books $31 Cdn. 360pp.) I was surprised to see in the Globe and Mail on March 24, an article on MRSA and VRE (antibiotic resistant diseases in hospitals) that indicated lab tests had managed to combine two unrelated drug resistant microorganisms that learned to share their resistance to different drugs. This has not been proven to have happened in NATURE yet, only IN VITRO but not IN VIVO; but they said, only a matter of time. This is exactly the premise of THIRD PANDEMIC. Ouellette's book suggests that fortuitous combination of salmonella, psitticosis, spirochetes, --- can result in a very contagious, lethal, and totally drug resistant organism. The news that Methicillin is impotent is followed by news that costly Vancomycin is becoming impotent. This is very scary news. Aside from any profit angle, we should be very grateful to the Synsorb inventors. And to the good folks over at Microbiologix, who also foresee disaster in the drug industry. I would short the big drug firms,and get heavily into Syb and MBI! But this is about more than money. In the end, we will find that Malthus was right, that we are too crowded, and too mobile, and that we are still animals and can perish like animals. O, ignoble end. ----end of rant ------- |