Left: Tim Tebow in 2014. (Brynn Anderson/AP). Right: Michael Vick in 2014. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Saks Fifth Avenue)
This past Lord’s Day, Tim Tebow had a message for the world. He cribbed it from a well-known letter from the Apostle Paul to his friends in Christ.
“Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you,” Tebow tweeted. He even cited his source: Ephesians 4:32.
Forgiveness was a great theme for Tebow to strike hours before he joined the Philadelphia Eagles. The signing, first reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter, marks the second time in less than a decade that a flailing quarterback has come to the City of Brotherly Love in need of some brotherly love.
Philly is, after all, a city of second chances: the place William Penn, a Quaker refugee from the Church of England, fled after facing religious persecution; the territory founding father Ben Franklin lit out for after escaping his abusive half-brother in Boston; where David Bowie made the classic record “Young Americans” after killing his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust; the place Sylvester Stallone — an actor with a partially paralyzed face who did softcore porn before he was nominated for two Oscars — made the home of perennial loser Rocky Balboa; and the city where criminal QB Michael Vick started a new life.
And just like it helped Vick, maybe Philadelphia can help Tebow.
[Tim Tebow reportedly agrees to deal with Eagles]
[You weren’t the only one who heard the Tim Tebow news and thought of Skip Bayless]
Tebow, of course, wants a very different kind of redemption than former Eagle Vick. Before he served time in prison for charges related to illegal dogfighting, Vick was a star for the Atlanta Falcons — “an explosive dual threat, a video game hero come to life,” as the New York Daily News modestly put it. Vick was in the middle of a 10-year, $130 million contract when he pleaded guilty in a U.S. district court, was suspended by the NFL and traded a playbook for a prison cell. His talent wasn’t in question; his ability to function as a law-abiding citizen was.
“You were instrumental in promoting, funding and facilitating this cruel and inhumane sporting activity,” a judge told Vick before sentencing him to 23 months behind bars. “I’m not convinced you’ve fully accepted responsibility.”
Tebow, meanwhile, is ready to take responsibly for every human soul on god’s green Earth. He says Jesus “has a special plan for each person”; he talks about playing for the glory of the almighty. Heck, the guy even has a verb: Starting in 2010 with Tebow’s initial stint with the Denver Broncos, praying after a sports victory came to be called “Tebowing.”
[God’s quarterbacks: What Tebow and Roethlisberger reveal about evangelical politics]
Fans love the piety. But they’d love a better football player more.
“Not since Michael Vick has the prospect of a new quarterback joining the Eagles created such a stir,” wrote Nick Fierro of Allentown’s the Morning Call. “But in Tim Tebow’s case, the nervous fan base went to DEFCON 1 within minutes … The man simply is not an NFL quarterback. Everybody knows that.”
The gamble the Eagles took on Vick when they signed him in 2009 paid off — for Vick. Though he eventually signed a six-year, $100 million contract with the Birds, he brought them no Super Bowl rings and played in just one postseason game. (The Eagles lost, but Vick was still named “Comeback Player of the Year.”) The team was praised by President Obama for giving Vick a second chance, but the beneficiary of their goodwill was plagued by injuries. He jetted off to the New York Jets last year — a lesser player, but a redeemed man.
Now, it’s Tebow’s turn. He’s already been washed in the blood. But can an inconsistent 27-year-old ex-commentator — one who’s very public faith makes him a target as much as an inspiration — help save a team with chronic quarterback problems that, lest anyone forget, has never won a Super Bowl?
“Tebow is also exactly like any street free agent that hasn’t played a regular season snap since 2012,” Gregg Rosenthal of Around the NFL wrote. “The burden of proving he’s an NFL player is entirely on him.”
A member of the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela in 2012. (LEO RAMIREZ/AFP/Getty Images)
Hand wipes. Hand sanitizer. Penicillin and Cipro. The tools the modern world has to fight diseases are many — but as diseases learn to fight back, they’re getting deadlier. And people in the know are scared.
“Antibiotic resistance has been called one of the world’s most pressing public health problems,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Almost every type of bacteria has become stronger and less responsive to antibiotic treatment when it is really needed. … For this reason, antibiotic resistance is among CDC’s top concerns.”
Antibiotic resistance was thought to be a battle for the modern world — a first-world problem facing a pampered civilization of helicopter parents and germaphobes eager for prescriptions to battle the common cold. But a new study shows that even those who can’t get antibiotics can be resistant to them, and the implications for public health may be huge.
[MRSA superbug killed by 1,100-year-old home remedy, researchers say]
“Why do people warn you about overusing antibiotics?” said Gauntam Dantas, a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who contributed to “The microbiome of uncontacted Amerindians,” published in the journal Science Advances this month. “They worry that resistance is going to rise.”
Dantas and other researchers studied a group of 54 people from an isolated village in Venezuela first contacted by the outside world in 2009. Though parts of their extended tribe — the Yanomami, a group of more than 30,000 individuals who live in the Amazon — had contact with the outside world, this village did not. All the trappings anyone able to read this article on an iPhone may take for granted — among them, antibiotics and the germ theory of disease — were alien. Yet, by taking fecal, oral and skin samples, researchers found that though these Yanomami had no contact with antibiotics, they had genes that offered resistance to them.
“Despite their isolation, presumably for >11,000 years since their ancestors arrived in South America, and no known exposure to antibiotics, they harbor bacteria that carry functional antibiotic resistance (AR) genes, including those that confer resistance to synthetic antibiotics,” the paper read.
Okay: So what?
“This says the situation is almost worse,” Dantas said.
[Antibiotics are becoming less effective, and their overuse is making them dangerous]
Modern medicine had thought that by limiting the overuse of antibiotics, we could solve the problem of antibiotic resistance. If animals can be raised outside of factory farms that demand inoculation and people don’t take medicine when they don’t need to, the thinking goes, bacteria won’t evolve and get stronger.
“Every time you use an antibiotic, it kills some — but not all — of the bacteria in your body,” according to Consumer Reports. “The survivors might mutate, modifying their genetic material so that they are no longer vulnerable to the drug.”
The magazine’s advice: “Don’t push for antibiotics.”
But if humans can be resistant to antibiotics whether they use them or not, the problem of antibiotic resistance is all the more dangerous.
“Resistance existed before we came up with antibiotics,” Dantas said. “… When we overuse them — dump them into animals — we are not starting from scratch. All of those warnings we should pay even more heed to.”
(AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)
Dantas said it was “highly unlikely” that these Yanomami were exposed to antibiotics commercially or in their environment. He said they were first contacted by a Venezuelan medical mission concerned that gold miners operating illegally in the Amazon might expose them to infectious disease. The mission vaccinated the Yanomami after the samples were taken.
“They knew the word medicinas – certainly had contact with other Yanomami,” he said. “… There were aware of the idea of the outside world. The reason they were not scared was the fact that they had some idea that there was access to health care.”
Researchers also found that the “microbiome,” the community of microorganisms living in the bodies of those in industrialized countries was about 40 percent less diverse than that of the Yanomami. Dantas said we don’t know how microbiome diversity affects our health. But the practice of killing potentially helpful bacteria with antibiotics and sanitizers might not be smart.
“Our results bolster a growing body of data suggesting a link between, on one hand, decreased bacterial diversity, industrialized diets and modern antibiotics, and on the other, immunological and metabolic diseases — such as obesity, asthma, allergies and diabetes, which have dramatically increased since the 1970s,” Maria Dominguez-Bello, an associate professor of medicine at New York University and senior author of the study, said in a statement. “We believe there is something occurring in the environment during the past 30 years that has been driving these diseases, and we think the microbiome could be involved.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment