"Dear President Obama:The above was excerpted from: An Open Letter to President Obama from E.coli 0104:H4 by Ralph Nader, June 3, 2011
My name is E.coli 0104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Bavaria, charged with being "a highly virulent strain of bacteria." Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure - so far.* Massive publicity and panic all around.
You can't see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a "biological terrorist," an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a "conspiracy of mutants."
It is not my fault, I want you to know. I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this. I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my Petri dish to you.
This outbreak in Germany has been traced to food - location unknown. What is known to you is that invisible terrorism from bacterium and viruses take massively greater lives than the terrorism you are spending billions of dollars and armaments to stop in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Your agencies, such as the Center for Disease Control, conduct some research but again nothing compared to the research for your missiles, drones, aircraft and satellites.
You speak regularly about crushing the resistance of your enemies. But you splash around so many antibiotics (obviously I don't like this word and consider it genocidal) in cows, bulls, chickens, pigs and fish that your species is creating massive antibiotic resistance, provoking our mutations, so that we can breed even stronger progeny. You are regarded as the smartest beings on Earth, yet you seem to have too many neurons backfiring.
You are hung up on certain kinds of preventable violence without any risk/benefit analysis. This, you should agree, is utterly irrational. You should not care where the preventable violence comes from except to focus on its range of devastation and its susceptibility to prevention or cure!
E-cologically yours,
E.coli 0104:H4 (for the time being)"
* Bill Marler has been keeping track. On June 12 he wrote: "35 dead and likely to rise! 812 with acute kidney failure – at least 100 will require kidney transplants! Many of the others ill will suffer with brain damage, kidney dysfunction, diabetes, bowel and heart disease for the remainder of their lives!"
- German Sprout Farmer's "Bad Luck" - I say E. coli!
I have to agree with mister or misses E.coli 0104:H4 up there. If 35 Americans died and hundreds were maimed by the hand of a terrorist, we would be up in arms. We would not be classifying those deaths a result of "bad luck." We would be enacting policies to protect ourselves from further assault, not perpetuating behaviors that invite these biological terrorists.
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