General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: You can't criticize one pseudoscience when supporting another. [View all]Sancho
(9,067 posts)Antibiotics as a class of drugs are one simple example where there were unanticipated consequences over a long history of applied use and development. The links provided simply demonstrate that it's not me, but the CDC and the scientific world who clearly recognize the problems.
Debating antibiotic use is a waste of time if you don't accept the current medical and scientific consensus. As a chief of staff at a major hospital and a professor of medicine once told me, "those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still."
You are so intent on defending GMOs that you refuse to see your logical fallacy. GMO evidence is still too early, tainted by profit motive, and too rapidly expanding for anyone to know exactly how "safe" they will appear to be in the future even in the narrow area of crop manipulations. The misapplication of antibiotics over time was an obvious example to make the point of applied science and unintended consequences that could easily parallel GMOs.
It is clear that GMO technology as applied science is about 30 years old and there are NOT definitive experimental studies for long term possibilities (like insecticide resistant crops for example) over many decades of manipulation. GMOs are expanding rapidly with little more research than simple correlational comparisons post hoc with non GMO convenience samples. We won't know what's safe or environmentally responsible for a long time to come. That's why some other countries are more cautious than the US. Maybe the caution is unnecessary. Only time will tell.
Just like with antibiotics, there may be a learning curve and consequences, so rushing headlong into something isn't prudent. With vaccines the positives were so great that jumping in quickly may have been justified - but even then the on-going applied science and number of controlled observations over the last century is not equivalent to more recent GMO use in crops for food production.
Finally, just for your late night reading I'll give you a reference since you misunderstood some of my previous post:
"The way they test is to grow the bacteria on an agar plate. They compare the growth on the plate without any antibiotics to plates with specific antibiotics. If the bacteria grows on a plate with an antibiotic, it is resistant to that antibiotic.
In other words, the test is exactly the same thing that Flemming did in 1928."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC89006/
...and
http://mmbr.asm.org/content/74/3/417.full