What's With All The Coughin'

"Persistent Cough: Pertussis rises in young adults and infants" by B. Harder (_Science News_ v. 166, #19, Nov. 6, 2004, p. 292). This report, which deals with concern over a rise in what we used to call whooping cough, in spite of having a vaccine available for "nearly a century," concludes in a very interesting fashion. Noting that "some researchers have been concerned" about the possibility of genetic changes in "the most common pertussis-causing microbe," the article both claims "Those bacteria have evolved since the 1960s" and yet also that "they don't appear to have become more dangerous or more resistant to vaccines" according to "Nicole Guiso of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Instead, she says, recent mutations in the bacteria may reflect their ongoing adaptation to living exclusively in people, which they appear to have done for fewer than 500 years."

So, the "evolution" is not a matter of chance mutations providing increased complexity to overcome the selection pressure of vaccines, which would support evolution, but merely a refinement of the gene pool to adapt to a limited environment, and it's a recent development, all well within creation science expectations.

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump