Sydney, Australia’s harbour Credit: Pablo Fernandez/Flickr/Creative Commons
If reports coming out of Australia are correct, this year’s flu season in the Northern Hemisphere could be particularly nasty.
Of course, Australia is just finishing off its winter when the flu bug becomes the most prominent, and we in the north are just entering our winter season.
A report on an Australian news site says this year was particularly bad with a record-setting 172,247 reported cases of the flu. Australia’s immunization Coalition (IC) states this is 156% higher than the number reported last year at the same time.
IC suspects that this year’s estimate is undoubtedly low because the health system is under such stress they are behind in their reporting. It is uncertain what the final count will be.
Doctors are also describing the flu as a “super strain” meaning it is more potent than what they had seen in the past. The elderly and very young are particularly vulnerable.
So far doctors have recorded 288 deaths due to the flu, but again this is probably low.
They advise people to get the flu vaccine this year, though the article on news.com.au noted:
Australia’s health services are buckling under the pressure as the flu rate soars, fuelled by a mutant strain of influenza A (H3N2) thought to be responsible for many deaths, even though it was included in this year’s vaccine.
One thing that annoys me is the claim often found in these articles that the flu bug has mutated.
It leaves the impression we are seeing evolution in action.
They use the same argument to explain why some diseases have built up a resistance to antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing concern as bugs with a natural immunity to medicines traditionally used to fight them are showing up around the world, making them very dangerous.
Like the flu bug, there are repeated references on how these bacteria mutated to have a natural resistance to modern drugs.
But recently, researchers with California Polytechnic State University (CPSU) made a stunning discovery while studying the guts of nine Inca mummies, some over 1,000 years old.
They found antibiotic resistant bacteria in these bodies. They described the finding as “very surprising” and the discovery refutes any notion that these drug-resistant super bugs mutated after we developed antibiotics to fight them.
These drug-resistant bacteria existed thousands of years before medical researchers created tetracycline, penicillin and vancomycin.
CPSU spokesperson Raul Cano said:
“It’s ridiculous to think that evolution of anti-biotic resistance began when penicillin was discovered.”
It is like modern humans, some of us have blue eyes, other brown or green. We are all different and it is part of our genetic code.
The same thing with bacteria, some have a natural resistance to antibiotics and others didn’t.
When modern drugs killed off the bacteria population without a genetic resistance, what remained were those that had it and they came to the forefront.
These super-bugs as we call them have always been around hovering in the background.
But the Book of Revelation, the Apostle John’s vision of the end times, had a different explanation for ‘super-bugs’:
6 These have the power to shut up the sky, so that rain will not fall during the days of their prophesying; and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every plague, as often as they desire. (Revelation 11:6 NASV)
15 Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels who had seven plagues, which are the last, because in them the wrath of God is finished. (Revelation 15:1 NASV)
Sources:
OpentheWord.org 