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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6732961" data-attributes="member: 177">Not at all, except insofar as nature makes it so.  Or, perhaps alternatively, you've misstated the problem.The ultimate problem is not, "use of antibiotics has led to us not having good ways to treat bacterial infections".  This is plainly seen by considering an alternate universe, in which we never had antibiotics - we'd *still* have no good ways to treat bacterial illness.  If the same state would exist whether or not antibiotics exist, then clearly the antibiotics are not actually at the root of the problem.The real problem is that bacteria are crafty buggers.  Crafty enough that we have not yet developed a single static approach to treating them, and may never.  Tt chnages teh view of it from "modern medicine is causing problems" to "modern medicine is responding to problems".So long as we remember that "short term" is "generations".  Penicillin was first developed in 1928, and it and its derivatives are still in use today.But bacterial infections did that *before* penicillin, too.  Antibiotics did not create the situation.  It is just that a single formulation does not resolve the situation for all time.  Yeah, guess what, evolution happens, and we must constantly adapt.With respect - the *media* panicked.  Governments panicked.  some people in out population panicked.  The medial experts?  Not so much panic.  Statements of concern, statements that we have to be *wise* in how we use certain drug.  But "panic" is not a word I'd use to describe the reaction.Nothing misleading at all.  I said that, after you are born, the only way for a viral infection to directly impact the genetics of your children is if the infection strikes your testes or ovaries.  Influenza?  Doesn't do that.  Rhinovirus?  HIV?  Don't do that.  What happens in your upper respiratory system, for example, can't impact your kid's genetics.It is important to note that, in fact, most viruses *don't* have the ability to impact our genetic material at all. Some viruses carry their own DNA that gets transcribed to RNA and then to proteins in our cells.  Others have RNA that gets transcribed directly to proteins.  A third type has RNA, which gets transcribed to DNA, which gets inserted into the host cell's genome, and *then* gets translated *back* into RNA and then to proteins.  This last type is the sort that might regularly change human genetic material to get passed on .So, for this to be relevant, we need a double whammy - we need a virus that implants code into the cell's genes (like a retrovirus does), and *also* infects the gonads.  There are some, but there are many more that don't, and for the ones that do, their effect is only felt on evolutionary timescales.  We are talking about a problem for 10,000 years from now or more.</blockquote>

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