By standardizing around one strain, we discard the evolutionary virtues of hybrid vigor. We have augmented other opportunities for the very small by concentrating ourselves and our food in smaller spaces. We increasingly recycle waste products in animal feed, even after mad cow disease alerted us to the danger of adding the remains of dead sheep and cows to cattle feed. We ourselves drink water that has already gone through several other people before it reaches our taps. Most alarmingly, we are disabling our best defenses against pathogens by the profligate use of antibiotics.
Bacteria can develop resistance to any antibiotic, given sufficient use.
Late last year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed banning the use of a class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones in poultry, citing increases in resistance to that drug in campylobacter, a food-borne pathogen that can cause diarrhea in humans. The ban was accepted by one manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories, but the other, Bayer, is contesting the need for restrictions, which already have been proposed or implemented in several European countries and Australia. Given our imperfect systems of monitoring and the long incubation times of many diseases, these policies can never prevent the spread of infection. Some officials, including Germany's new minister for agriculture, Renate Kuenast of the Green Party, propose to lock out the rest of the world, calling for a return to primitive agrarian communities that consume only what they can locally grow. For urbanized societies that have grown dependent upon the world's bounty, this is hardly feasible.