The scary thing about this, and someone correct me if I’m wrong, is that this shit can spread from the deer to like every level of the food chain. I think I read somewhere there’s concern that the prions can get into plants from deer droppings.
I’m not afraid of much, but prion disease and the implications are legitimately terrifying. It’s the same sort of existential fear that kept me awake at night as a kid thinking about nuclear war (I grew up in the 80s).
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I know there are a lot of reasons to be afraid of a lot of things these days, but to date there has been exactly zero known cases of chronic wasting disease in humans.
That’s zero. As in, there is no evidence that it has ever happened. Not even once. Ever.
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This chart is maddening. There’s no excuse for measles to be a thing in 2012, much less 2020. We know how to stop this shit and it’s not even hard at all. Even in USA#1 with all the dumbfuck anti-vaxxers out there we still have no measles deaths. We can’t stop corona virus from running buck wild but we can stop thousands of Africans from getting measles and we just won’t. Shit is inexcusable.
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that’s not the only prion disease.
don’t eat brains, people!
I don’t eat brains, I eat Bambi burgers.
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Shit’s wild, yo. Just don’t eat the brains of your ancestors, it’s not good at all. Also, wash your hands and stop eating venison.
Transmission
In 1961, Australian Michael Alpers conducted extensive field studies among the Fore accompanied by anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum.[9] Their historical research suggested the epidemic may have originated around 1900 from a single individual who lived on the edge of Fore territory and who is thought to have spontaneously developed some form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.[20] Alpers and Lindenbaum’s research conclusively demonstrated that kuru spread easily and rapidly in the Fore people due to their endocannibalistic funeral practices, in which relatives consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the “life force” of the deceased to the hamlet, a Fore societal subunit.[21] Corpses of family members were often buried for days, then exhumed once the corpses were infested with maggots, at which point the corpse would be dismembered and served with the maggots as a side dish.[22]
No one eats shit in a literal sense, but E. coli infection is still a very real thing in the first world if you don’t cook your burgers. Think about that for a bit.
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Lack of funding remains a huge impediment to successfully curbing the outbreak. So far, US$ 27.6 million have been mobilized. However, a further US$ 40 million are required for a six-month plan to extend the vaccination to children between six and 14 years and to reinforce elements of the outbreak response beyond vaccination, including improving treatment, health education, community engagement, health system strengthening, epidemiological surveillance and response coordination.
I’m madder than a boiled owl at this shit. $40 million is two orders of magnitudes less than a rounding error on USA#1’s budget but we still won’t do shit to help thousands of Africans dying of easily preventable diseases like measles because we’re just too fucking cheap. It’s fucking measles. We knew how to stop measles even back back in the day before humans landed on the moon.
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To be fair, there are a number of African nations that are so fucked up that it’s impossible to get health care workers to get the meds to the people to need them for internal political reasons - Sudan and the DRC especially - but there are a lot of places where the incidence should be zero, or close to it. But in some places, it’s not just writing a check for $40 mil that fixes the problem.
MM MD
Regarding the Democratic Republic of the Congo…
If you haven’t seen this video you should. The part where it talks about counties where most of the wealth is dug up out of the ground applies. DRC is awash in mineral wealth. (12:35)
The DRC is a complete shitshow - and that was an interesting video. Thanks.
MM MD
Just pointing out that this is wrong, sanitizer is fine if your hands aren’t actually soiled.
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1 death in Taiwan bringing the total deaths to 5 outside of China. Total cases outside China up to 777.
27 of those cases listed as serious or critical.
For the eleventh time anyone who actually believes that the numbers of infected in Africa and South America are remotely believable… please tell me why so I can stop worrying about it. Zero cases to me screams ‘we have no idea but we’re pretending there’s no problem until it kicks the door in’.
Isn’t Chronic Wasting disease the kind of disease that could take years to present itself? Or am I confusing it with Mad Cow.
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Neither of those articles is remotely reassuring lol.
Are the olympics in Japan going to happen?