Bacterial resistance and The Heart of Darkness Stories about bacterial resistance make me have second thoughts about loosening regulations on prescriptions and decentralizing control of medical treatment (the libertarian in me). I have a friend who's a 4th year medical student who told me that many of his patients (generally parents with children) come into the office demanding antibiotics, and that one of his major tasks is to convince them otherwise. The story above reports on a woman in Detroit with a super-bacteria. This has important social implications: I read once that the common cold can not exist below a certain population density, explaining the fatalities that the cold can inflict upon hunter gatherers. A city like Detroit, on the verge of collapse, with a large portion of the populace not self-supporting and weaned on socialized medicine is petri dish that will likely incubate the next plague. Peter Brimelow of VDARE has trumpeted the warning for years about immigrants bringing diseases from the Third World, but pestilence will be given succor in urban deserts like Detroit [1]. [1] Before I got on the plane for America when I was 4, the authorities loaded me up with a large battery of shots. I screamed and bitched at the time, but I'm glad they did it. One of the things that bothers me about the amnesty for illegal immigrants of Mexican nationality is that these people have avoided these sort of epidemiological inoculations but still might look forward to naturalization. Call me petty, but it grates on me.