Wildlife and Livestock a Risk Factor in Future Pandemics, Say Studies (theguardian.com) 60
The risk of pathogens spilling over from wildlife trade and farmed animals into humans should be key considerations in efforts to prevent the next pandemic, research suggests. From a report: Researchers have been assessing the risks of the different ways that disease-causing organisms jump from animals to humans in an effort to characterise and address the risk of the next pandemic. In a study published in the journal Biological Reviews, University of Cambridge scientists found that while the risk of another pandemic cannot be eliminated, systemic changes in the way we interact with animals, in general, could substantially minimise the probability.
The risks are not just linked to exotic wild animals, they caution. "There's a natural tendency, particularly in the western world, to imagine that this has nothing to do with us. It's something remote and exotic ⦠something that someone else has been doing," said the study's lead author Dr Silviu Petrovan, a veterinarian and wildlife expert at Cambridge. "I suppose what most people have in their minds is not the venison that they buy in Waitrose -- which, of course, is wildlife -- but rather something altogether more exotic."
The risks are not just linked to exotic wild animals, they caution. "There's a natural tendency, particularly in the western world, to imagine that this has nothing to do with us. It's something remote and exotic ⦠something that someone else has been doing," said the study's lead author Dr Silviu Petrovan, a veterinarian and wildlife expert at Cambridge. "I suppose what most people have in their minds is not the venison that they buy in Waitrose -- which, of course, is wildlife -- but rather something altogether more exotic."
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We have enough trouble with people who refuse to wear a mask in a pandemic, because they think it "violated their rights". We have an other set of people who will refuse to take a Vaccine because they are not being forced too, and are afraid that it is being used to spy on people.
Dietary habits are extremely strong cultural and religious activities. Trying to get people to stop eating red meat is going to a huge cluster where the effort will not be worth the reward.
Not all people can tolerate an all vegeta
Re:Getting the rifle and DDT (Score:4, Insightful)
"... We have an other set of people who will refuse to take a Vaccine because they are not being forced too, and are afraid that it is being used to spy on people. ..."
Yet they upload their entire life to the internet, hoping more of the world population would see it and 'like' it.
Spare us the double-dip. (Score:5, Insightful)
We had enough trouble with morons who shut down the economy because of a virus with a 98%+ survival rate.
Fun Fact: The lockdown would only have lasted three months if a significant portion of the population didn't devolve into complete fucking dipshits and resist wearing masks. Ya'll apparently loved the lockdown and, frankly. that's affected your credibility.
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Tell that to Japan, before the olympics they had a 3% vaccine rate in the country....
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More people will die worldwide...
Documentation needed of a death toll from starvation larger than the 4+ million killed by SAR2 (so far).
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https://www.npr.org/sections/c... [npr.org]
"Every year, around 9 million people die of hunger, according to the international relief agency Mercy Corps."
Of course, this has fuck all to do with a virus that's killing a ton of people and all the folks apathetic enough to not get vaccinated or take recommended safety precautions and keeping this crap running around and mutating the next 20 years.
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So if 13 million people had starved to death last year he might be correct. Seems doubtful.
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Lol you guys will believe anything.
PSA: No, Biden's not taking your hamburgers away AND you're stupid for falling for it.
Re: Getting the rifle and DDT (Score:1)
I love how you scrambled to find something that at least sounds substantive to back up that claim but the headline alone gives away your con.
Utterly brilliant.
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Guess I've never met any good liberals in my 60 years on Earth. That's rather surprising since I've spent half of it in Seattle on the Left Coast.
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That would explain why the government killed all the birds [birdsarentreal.com]. The surveillance drones they replaced them with are to track all the rest of the evil critters.
First post, from the Duh! Deptartment (Score:3)
Seriously? Common knowledge if you ask me.
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Is it though? Look how easily many bought into the idea that COVID-19 was bioengineered, despite the fact that it's been fairly well known since the 18th century that pathogens can jump between livestock and humans. The first real breakthrough in vaccination came when it was recognized that farmers getting a relatively minor infection from catching cowpox from their livestock conferred some degree of immunity against smallpox. Further, we've known for a long time that close proximity between humans and anim
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yes, we get influenza and other viruses from animals circulating around the globe every year, it's common knowledge. Sometimes those turn into global pandemics, common knowledge. All educated people know that. I'm amazed a headline that spews the blatantly obvious about a known recurring thing exists on slashdot.
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Is it though? Look how easily many bought into the idea that COVID-19 was bioengineered, despite the fact that it's been fairly well known since the 18th century that pathogens can jump between livestock and humans. The first real breakthrough in vaccination came when it was recognized that farmers getting a relatively minor infection from catching cowpox from their livestock conferred some degree of immunity against smallpox. Further, we've known for a long time that close proximity between humans and animals (wild or domesticated) greatly increases the likelihood of inter-species transmission. In at least some cases, the reason that major pandemics came from Eastern Asia had to do with that region having a much higher population, again making proximity between humans and animals a potential vector, and then, with denser populations, once a pathogen has made the leap, greatly increasing the initial spread of the new strain.
Evolution is an extraordinary thing, and in no other family of organisms does it happen faster than in viruses. It's virtually assured that so long as there are humans, there will be pathogens that evolve the capacity to infect us and then spread between us. Evolution is an arms race, and viruses, in particular RNA viruses, due to the fundamental instability of their genomes, will always have the edge.
I don't eat Bat or Pangolin. I also don't eat "bushmeat"
Most of what I eat is monitored and managed by federal agencies. Some chicken, pork and beef.
If there are a whole ton of pathogens in that food, other than being trafficked to China for processing, and then back to the US, (which I try to avoid) then there really isn't anything I can do about it, other than buying and consuming locally sourced meat.
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The possible origins of the 1918-19 influenza virus (H1N1) was waterfowl, with pigs as a possible intermediate species (pigs can be infected by avian flus, and thus can act as an intermediate between birds and humans). If you imagine the only way viruses can make the species leap is by eating bushmeat, you know woefully little about the subject.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Re:First post, from the Duh! Deptartment (Score:4, Informative)
Also H1N1 (pigs), hantavirus (mice), west nile (birds), zika (primates), Lyme (rodents)....
All of those originated or are pretty common in the US and none of which (except maybe the first) involved eating anything.
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University of Ottawa thinks, because of the types of mutations found, that the intermediate species for SARS2 may have been feral dogs that ate dead/sick bats.
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Look how easily many bought into the idea that COVID-19 was bioengineered
Yeah, those ignorant virologists.
https://www.business-standard.... [business-standard.com]
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In all honesty though most people in the 3rd World have a far better grasp on the relationship between people eating sick animals and getting sick themselves, because they've seen it happen. When you buy your plastic-wrapped piece of cow at Safeway does it ever occur to you whether this critter may have been carrying something or not? Don't lie, it never occurs to you unless the press is barking about Mad Cow Disease or some such. When we go to the market in Cusco we're not going to be buying meat from t
Cook your damn food, problem solved. (Score:2)
It really is that simple.
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That's not enough. We also need to cook the people who caught/raised, traded, slaughtered, and handled the animals. Then we'll be golden.
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Also everyone in proximity to any sort of wildlife. Maybe automate food production and move everyone into domed cities, but only if you can keep out the rats and pigeons.
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What? Swine flu comes from a mutated virus that infects live pigs and passed to their handlers, not from eating undercooked pork.
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What? Swine flu comes from a mutated virus that infects live pigs and passed to their handlers, not from eating undercooked pork.
We had a couple cases in my province just recently. Increased testing due to COVID is probably the only reason they were noticed.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
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The trouble is in the steps involved in turning a live animal into cooked meat, this is where disease transfer can occur even if the meat is well-done. Another item to add to the long list of Problems With Farming. If we could replace livestock farming with artificial meat substitutes, it would directly solve a wide range of health and environmental issues, and might just improve a wide range of seemingly unrelated issues that come along with old-school farmers wielding large amounts of political power. It
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> If we could replace livestock farming with artificial meat substitutes
Perhaps, but our understanding of human nutrition is too nascent to take on something like that now.
Poor farming practices can definitely be a problem, but you're not seeing these from regenerative farms - just CAFO's and people living with animals.
And the really bad pandemics don't result from a bat humping a pangolin then being made into soup. That's just the crap you have to hear from racists these days (yeah, you Daszak).
The 19
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We can't be quite sure where the H1N1 strained started (though I have heard the Nebraska theory), but we do know that it originated as an avian influenza virus, that likely infected pigs (pigs are susceptible to avian influenza viruses), and from pigs it leapt to humans. And that's really the point. Some of the most significant pandemics in history were the result of humans living in close proximity to livestock and other animals endemic to human populations. The Black Death likely started in Asia with huma
Problem solved (Score:2)
Re: Problem solved (Score:1)
No more easy global travel (Score:4, Insightful)
The airlines and the open-borders crowd aren't going to like it. And my bucket list of things to do in Italy might stay unfulfilled, but I think the real answer to mitigating the next one is that we have to say bye bye to casual international travel for pleasure and for business that need not be conducted face to face.
School, work, immigration, they're long-term things that can probably remain in some form close to before, but popping over to the other side of the planet for christmas or Thanksgiving break or jetting over to Paris for fashion week might be no more.
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I don't know. The US is a big population pool and has a lot of climatic variation, with quite a few zoonotic diseases arising in the last couple decades. Better ban interstate travel and most commerce too.
Re: No more easy global travel (Score:1)
I suppose we could weld everyone into their homes while we're at it, or we can recognize the distinction between freedom of movement within a country and crossing national borders and transcontinental travel.
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Gotta draw the line somewhere hey? And if practical criteria give you the wrong answer, there's good old fashioned xenophobia!
Not that I'm opposed to the US isolating itself for a bit. Problem is, currently your half-vaccinated populace are screaming at us to let you into our country again.
Re: No more easy global travel (Score:1)
If acrophobia has the effect of preventing you from testing the hypothesis that you can fly by leaping off a bridge, it's not all bad. If arachnophobia has the effect of lowering your probability of getting bitten by nasty spidery critters, it has its upsides. And if xenophobia has the effect of not seeding your country with a disruptive and costly disease outbreak every decade or so, then it's not all bad either.
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I guess you missed the implications of "if practical criteria give you the wrong answer."
But I agree with you in principle! I think you're being kind of timid for writing off welding people in their houses, but I guess that does make it hard for them to work. Units the size of the US are useless. US state-size isn't great either, but maybe better than nothing.
I suppose the ideal solution would be to isolate each city, and carve up the rural areas around them into manageable chunks. You'd have people who wan
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Re: No more easy global travel (Score:1)
The jury is still out on whether quarantine works at scale. It worked in Australia until it didn't.
And your idea sounds good until you get into details: how do you avoid contamination on the dirty side when you're funelling all international arrivals into one spot?
No...if I had to bet money on anything, I'd say that lowering the volume of casual travel would have more of an effect.
FUD real life edition (Score:2)
Re: Antibiotics (Score:2)
Antibiotics are for bacteria. They do not affect viruses. This important medical fact should be shared as often as possible. Antibiotic resistance is a real problem and it is exacerbated significantly by patients demanding anti-biotics for no reason.
Unexpected benefits (Score:2)
Europeans took over the American continents primarily by disease. Disease the Europeans were resistant to from hanging out with cattle, sheep, and pigs for 10,000 years.
The idea that we might get diseases from cows shouldn't alarm anyone. This is normal. We've done it lots before. And it has made us stronger and more resilient to viral infection overall.
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> This is normal. We've done it lots before. And it has made us stronger and more resilient to viral infection overall.
This is 2020. We're not normal. We're not strong and we're not resilient. We are.... the millennial generation.
No Significant Change in Risk (Score:2)
There has been no significant change in the Risk associated with this occurring for the last billion years or so. What has changed is that some dullards (is there a better descriptive?) have finally recognized the extant risk and are bringing it to the attention of other dullards.
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There has been no significant change in the Risk associated with this occurring for the last billion years or so. What has changed is that some dullards (is there a better descriptive?) have finally recognized the extant risk and are bringing it to the attention of other dullards.
A billion* years ago there were just as many people packed together. And it was just as easy to fly around the world spreading disease.
Right?
*Also
million
hundred thousand
even 1,000 years ago.
The risks for pandemics really are different now.
The pandemic should be a wakeup call to stop ... (Score:1)
... creating deadly pathogens in labs. At least until the folks responsible for the mistakes that allowed it to escape and the lies to its origin are held accountable.
and pig factory farms (Score:2)