Immortality?

Society could be likened to a machine towards immortality, are we are being administered legal toxic chemicals enabling certain diseases to proliferate thus subsequently providing a platform for practice to eradicate such diseases? Controls on responsible organisations (BBC, The Press etc.) who are left to continuously glorify things such as binge drinking (Chris Moyles comes to mind) and the endless exposure of arseholed celebrities, not to mention the ones who are leniently dealt with by the courts over possession of class A substances, are non-existent and the problem of the relaxed attitude towards things such alcohol or drug* addiction is often left to the intervention of the British public at the receiving end of the media, let’s face it, most of us Brits find it easier to just let it be rather than jump up and down and complain. (* loosely phrased – including any medication)
The bio-chemistry of the liver is highly complex and we still have a lot to learn about how it functions, alcohol remains legal, cheap and in plentiful supply. Before we knew about the myriad of complications created by smoking, it was legal to smoke in public places, cigarette companies had a free run in the advertising sector and smoking was not seen as the anti-social habit that it has become today. This is possibly because there is not much more to be learned from the serious diseases that smoking can cause and proliferate. Anti-ageing creams are another issue, we don’t fully understand how the daily application of billions of nano-particles that can easily skip the barrier of the skin ending up in the bloodstream will affect long term health, but still there are no restrictions on their use. And of course there’s the controversy with mobile phones, it’s a fact that if you bombard living cells, especially in the brain, with high energy electro-magnetic radiation at reasonably high frequencies (900Mhz-1800Mhz in UK phones) it will damage them clearing the way for tumor growth, there are restrictions on the effective radiated power (ERP) of phones however. So it seems apparent that until things are more fully understood we will continue to consume the notion that it’s all under control when in all honesty, a lot of it is highly under-researched and thrown out into the public with government controlled backing, the government who know well enough that it could be a risk but will never know for sure otherwise, so in effect, we are very much a part of the research.

1 comment October 7th, 2008