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Fatal rattlesnake bites were not so common in the decades prior to 2002. Steve Curry, director of medical toxicology at Banner Poison Control Center, Phoenix, Arizona, can only remember five bite fatalities during that period. That has all changed. Since 2002, there have been five deaths from rattlesnake bites in Arizona, and the symptoms from the bites have intensified dramatically. The symptoms include pain, nausea, diarrhea, dry mouth, swelling of mouth and throat, and difficulty in breathing. Victims go into shock and die within minutes.

So far, no one knows why the bites have become so lethal. All that Jeffery Brent, clinical professor of medicine, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, knows is that this “is a brand new phenomenon.”¹ Perhaps this phenomenon is a foreshadowing of things to come.

The increasing ferocity of beasts is a phenomenon associated with end-time prophecy; particularly the period of seven years known as the Tribulation, or time of Jacob’s Trouble. It is during that time that the Four Horseman symbolically ride through the first half of the period dispensing death and destruction from wars, famine, and disease. And it is the fourth, and last, horseman that carries this extra lethal power of marshaling the beats of the earth:

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. (Rev 6:8; emphasis added)

At a time when killer bees are on the rise, and the more docile European bee is vanishing, these rattlesnakes seem to be part of a developing trend. Are the beasts of the earth being prepared?

Notes:

^1. Amanda Lee Myers, “Rattlesnake attacks spur severe reactions: Experts see a new phenomenon,” Dailynews.com, May 24, 2008. http://www.dailynews.com/search/

ci_9373276?IADID=Search-www.dailynews.com-www.dailynews.com

When disease causing viruses and bacteria mutate, they become extremely resilient. For example, the AIDS virus is so successful at mutating that it consistently fools the body’s immune system, and refuses to be eradicated by cocktails representing everything science can throw at it. The result is that people continue to die from AIDS. The tenacious and highly infectious methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is, as its name reveals, resistant to the strongest antibiotics available. It is so contagious that the prefix of community-associated (CA-MRSA) has been added to it. More menacing is its cousin Necortizing Fasciitis, the flesh eating variety, that is caused by MRSA. The efficiency of Necrotizing Fasciitis to overcome its victims is measured in hours.

In what scientists term molecular evolution, the deadly effects of these bacteria can result from a mutation of a single stain that renders it drug-resistant.

The interesting aspect to these examples of mutation in the scheme evolutionary theory is that random selection is supposed to depend on such mutations to select out the fittest specimens for survival. While all appears well for these diseases at the micro level, without the intervention of intelligent human beings, forestalling as best they could the disappearance of all hosts, they would have been doomed for survival at the macro level.

By being selected to completely destroy the host, the diseases end their own existence too. This apparent setback might be explained if natural selection was counting on population figures to perpetuate the strain only to mutate advantageously later on, but this would mean that natural selection was a third-party observer, with intelligence; something that does not fit the theory of blind chance.

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