OCCUPY WALL STREET

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

Excellent post! I'm so glad to hear someone bringing this up and correlating it to corporation action - the creation of monocultures, "pesticide ready" plants, GMOs and "terminal seeds," the wildly indiscriminate use of antibiotics in stockyard animals" as a natural (or unnatural) impetus and cause for the creation of superbugs like drug-resistant staff infections.

Persiphone, I've encouraged my students to write about a variety of topics, including OWS and this one. Do you have any sources for this that you like? One student is writing about this, and she's already accessed an article form The Altantic (6/11) and the PBS survival series segment. What else have you read that you like?

there are antibiotic resistant genes in GMOs as well. what i find interesting is that there was DNA specifically engineered to be antibiotic resistant in a lab in America and then it was pumped into the food supply all nice and quiet. meanwhile, the media is all about telling us that OVERuse of antibiotics is the real problem...not that that ISN'T a problem...but i suspect it's not THE problem. same with the use of antibiotics in meat. is it a good practice? no. is it bad for you to eat meat that has been grown with antibiotics? probably. but what we're NOT talking about is the specifically engineered DNA that was specifically made to be antibiotic resistant floating around in GMO foods that are neither labeled on products nor regulated.

to understand this, one would have to look at how foreign or new DNA is taken up by an organism, lets say for example e.coli. there are a couple ways this happens naturally. one way is called horizontal gene transfer where different strains of bacteria are capable of uptaking each other's DNA. some organisms release their DNA upon death and leave what we call DNA litter. so let's say you ingest an e.coil organism that is carrying antibiotic resistant DNA (cuz e.coli is what they use in agrotech to introduce new DNA into plant cells) and that antibiotic resistant DNA litter is now in your digestive tract and your natural e.coli that is swarming around your intestines picks up the DNA via horizontal transfer. and voila! a superbug is born. i believe that we've actually become human farms for these superbugs unwittingly via GMOs. and i suspect i'm not the only one. there seems to be a timeline correlation between the emergence of superbugs and GMOs that i find unsettling.

i've not found books on this stuff. but i do read a lot and i've taken enough microbiology classes to be sufficiently scared to death of our food. you won't find anything in the news either. i would say google some science journals on the matter and possibly news sources that are not in America. Europe is vehemently antiGMO. protestors even went as far as to invade and cut down GMO crops while the police just stood and watched. i think those vids are floating around youtube. if we did that here we would be arrested and sued. on a side note....GMOs aren't only in the food supply. there are acres upon acres of GMO trees growing in our forests, in the amazon, and gawd only knows where else. veggies will pollinate once. trees, however, will pollinate many times in their lifetime. and the location of many of these GMO tree palntings are a secret. why?