We will see more and more fungi infecting mammals in the coming years.
Mammals and birds evolved higher body temperatures in part to protect from fungal infections.
As most fungi are dying above 37°C. But a high temperature summer is a selection pressure on any mushroom trying to survive, and hence might evolve to survive 40° summers and thus also survive in our bodies.
I really hope cordyceps is one of the last to do this step.
Not sure about that. Outside temperature above 37 were common in many highly populated areas, even before "high temperature summer" (e.g., India, Indonesia, most of Brazil, etc.). If there was an actual selection pressure, we would have seen its results by now.
What does this add to the conversation? It's hardly a summary, and not to be too judgy but seems like a third-grader's PowerPoint - just showing images that reflect exactly what it's telling me (both in audio and in text).
> “I’m convinced that half of the human cases that come from cats are people who are trying to stuff pills down their cat’s throats to treat the sporotrichosis,”
Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food. Problem solved. Difficult with multiple cats but I had two and one needed medication so I put this little guys on a window sill he loved to perch on which the other cat didn't care to reach.
This doesn’t necessarily work. Some pills taste bad, and the cat will refuse weird-tasting food.
I recommend everyone who has healthy cats to talk to their vet about administering empty capsules. Just so you and the cat get comfortable with the process before you need it.
Kind of like you need to train them from an early age that clipping their nails is fine.
When your cat gets old, they will need to take oral supplements, at the very least. You’re the person they trust the most to give them.
Maybe mix it with cat nip. My Mom used to have to mix medicine in with the pig's feed. They were very good at eating around the medicine. To get around that she would prepare a concoction of beer and molasses and feed and the medicine. They then ate all of it.
Its not always that easy. For example cerenia tastes very bitter for a cat. My cat will start drooling almost uncontrollably if he tastes it. He has a kidney condition and needs it for the rest of his life. I've tried crushing it, but he will then just ignore the food because of the bitter taste of the pill. Putting it in something like easy-pill will work a couple of times. Until he realizes the disgusting taste he is going to experience when eating the easy-pill. At that point you can't trick him anymore with an easy-pill.
So the only way I can give it to him (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth so he never tastes it and immediately swallows it.
I may be crazy but I feel like we shouldn't be giving medicine to animals with communicable diseases (unless the medicine reduces the chances of animal->human transmission). We're just reducing the effectiveness of these medicines over time.
We ought to have learned after the Covid “herd immunity” policies that killed hundreds of thousands around the world, that infectious disease control should be grounded on actual research, and not on simplified world models.
I understand, didn’t mean to imply they were suggesting herd immunity. But then you’ll have people not taking their cats to the vet because they don’t want them to be culled, increasing exposure and limiting our access to reliable data.
My point is, take this uninformed opinion that goes against the researchers’ recommendation for what it is: wrong.
Most people now treat pets as children, expensive surgeries even are commonplace. Good luck convincing them not to medicate their pet when a medicine for the disease exists
A. I have cats that don't go anywhere special that the other cats don't go so that doesn't work unless I supervise.
B. It's difficult to make sure they get the entire dose, again unless you supervise. And good luck getting a cat to finish food they've decided they are done with.
C. I have cats that are picky enough to ignore any food that has a crushed pill in it. They can always tell. Yes even if I use smelly food.
D. Not all medications can be safely crushed. Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery.
> Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery.
Depends on the coating - some coatings only dissolve once they are out of the strongly acidic stomach. Slow dissolution is used in retarded medication, which may or may not be coincident with targeting post-stomach delivery.
Yeah I was trying to get the general point of "crushing the pill could interfere with effective delivery of the medicine" without getting too far into the weeds. Honestly it's usually fine and I do think mixing crushed pills with food is an important tool in a pet owners belt. It's just not the universal solution that was being implied.
When I had to give my cats thyroid pills, I mushed them into soft treats. This generally worked, but sometimes took a couple of tries. But this trick only works if the cat wants the treat more than they don't want the pill. A dog can be tricked into thinking the pill is the treat.
Flavored pill compounding is apparently also an option, but I've never tried it.
> Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food.
This does not work on compounds sensitive to stomach acids. Some medications (both veterinarian and human) have to be specially coated to survive this environment [1], if you crush the pills the medication gets less effective, completely ineffective or, like ibuprofen, irritate the stomach. Or, worst case, the medication is designed for retarded release in the stomach acid - and now that you've crushed it, the entirety of the compound is dissolved in the stomach at once.
Please always ask your veterinarian/physician, the pharmacy staff and always read the medication's application notes because particularly physicians often are unaware and the same ingredient on the prescription might be fulfilled by a crushable or a non-crushable variant which only the pharmacist knows.
The article doesn't address treatment efficacy in humans. How is it treated? How effective is the treatment? Can this develop resistance to the treatment? The spread mechanisms and persistence are concerning, but without info on treatment I'm not sure how much I should freak out about this.
It includes instructions for the general population and for medical professionals, as well as a couple of technical reports with tons of references to recent studies.
Deadly to immunocompromised people. Basically everything could be deadly to them. Cats also rarely attack human proactively. So not really a big concern.
Hypochlorous acid (HOCl) is highly effective at killing Sporothrix fungi, including Sporothrix brasiliensis
HOCl is the best non-toxic broad spectrum human compatible antimicrobial. I have been using it in many household applications since COVID started.
It can be prepared by electrolysis of acidified (e.g. vinegar, but ideally pH 5.5, and inorganic acids make it last way longer at that pH, but they are more dangerous to handle) salt water (high margin of safety) or alternatively prepared by mixing highly diluted bleach with an diluted acid (low margin of safety) to target 20-2000 ppm depending on your delivery method (e.g. one tablespoon of bleach and vinegar into a gallon of water). If you are worried about the safety of this approach, note that far, far less chlorine gas is emitted when made this way than by ordinary bathroom cleaning with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner.
The smell of HOCl is unique and completely different from chlorine gas. The small amount of chlorine gas emitted likes to sit on top of the surface of the water, but if this layer is blown away, the distinct smell of HOCl becomes apparent immediately. It smells like minty bubblegum or something more familiar: a swimming pool.
The good news is when making HOCl for disinfection purposes 20-2000 ppm, only very small quantities of chlorine gas are evolved. They can be reduced further by shaking the closed container used to make it, further dissolving the gas into solution to make more HOCl.
I run this solution in my humidifier at low concentrations to prevent microorganisms from growing in it. I also use the electrolysis method to accurately make very low concentrations for nasal rinses. Typically, 15-30 seconds from a $10 USB electrolyzer in salt water.
"AI Overview" blithely tells me HOCL can be easily made from the electrolysis of salt water.
Looking even a little deeper (Wikipedia) confirms that chlorine chemistry, especially when combined with electrolysis, is very complex, and it's hard to know if you're making the right thing. FWIW every sensible electrolysis-based DIY project has dire warnings about electrolysing solutions of common salt.
My cat's got a different kind of fungus, not sporotrichosis, but one that gives her sort of a "clown nose". We've been trying to treat it for years now and it always comes back. Every time the treatment takes 4-6 months with itraconazol.
Reminds me of the TV Series "The Last of us" [0], which: "... is set decades after the collapse of society caused by a mass fungal infection that transforms its hosts into zombie-like creatures". Of course, minus the zombies.
We are lucky that mass epidemics that plagued humans so far didn't affect the brain. Affections like rabies, that require individuals biting each other, and which are the inspirational source of all those zombie fantasies, do not count. That is an attack vector easy to spot and manage. The scary scenario is the one like with this Sporothrix Brasiliensis fungus, which can spread by merely "sneezing out the infectious yeast", and then remain potent (outside a host) for "up to 10 weeks", plus (the cherry on top) -- "developing the disease three years after" the infection event. Any kind of pandemic is scary by the sheer magnitude of its reach, but one that would affect the brain? That would be another level of scary.
Toxoplasma gondii affects animal behavior, I don't think it's a stretch to think it (or something similar) could affect humans in some way we haven't measured yet.
I think this is widely speculated already, right? It is just hard to measure human behavior. I mean one of the proposed effects on Wikipedia is a reduced aversion to cat urine. But obviously there is a correlation/causation question there, haha,
In the opening scene a scientist argues once the ambient temperature of some region is 37°C we'll all get eaten by fungus. It will evolve to live at body temperature.
There are some precedents for this: hibernating bats lower their body temperature to that of a moldy environment, and are getting infected with a fungus which kills 90% of them in some cases [2]. Logic goes that raising the ambient temperature could be the same (with some evolution thrown in) as lowering our body temperature.
Is it credible? No idea, not that kind of scientist.
I guess GP is hinting that referring to TLoS as a TV series is a bit similar to, say, referring to LotR as a movie series (when discussing the basic premise shared by the original and the adaptation).
Please note that this is an extremely rare disease even in Brazil, where it came from. Asked my vet, and two cousins who also are vets, and all of them knew of the disease from scientific literature and government health bulletins, but only one of them had treated two actual cases, when he lived in northeastern region: two strays.
Brasil must have something like between 40 and 50 million cats (including strays). An infectious disease that killed thousands (what the article means? 1000, 2000? 10000?) while not ignorable, it is not exactly highly prevalent.
It is not that rare, the epidemic is just focused on the south region right now.
Porto Alegre metropolitan area is having a huge outbreak. My girlfriend is a vet and has been dealing with new cases multiple times a week.
Many of our friends also got it (it is very hard to not get scratched when handling with cats in pain).
It is a really really shitty, painful and hard to treat disease, requiring multiple months of treatment. It is very painful but usually not letal for humans and cats that are in the earlier stages and get treatment.
However it is absolutely lethal for populations of wild and stray cats, as it is very infectious and 100% lethal unassisted.
"We report the first three cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis outside South America, and the first ever cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis *in the United Kingdom*".
Ever since I started riding a motorcycle I've started to believe this to be the case too. I get so many bug splats on my helmet, jacket, and motorcycle that I'd never have if I was driving a car. By the end of most rides out in the country on the highway I'm covered in splats.
i've noted less bugs on the windshield but about the same on the optics and the radiator screen, so i go with the aerodynamics explanation as well. bugs are there because i see the bug swarms around the road too.
There is a ballot measure this Fall in Oregon that would ban pet and livestock ownership in the state. The backers got over 100,000 people to sign the petition.
There are people that either simply do not understand the natural order that the majority of humans want to eat meat and keep pets, or they do not care about other people enough to respect their lifestyle choices.
So a disease that has killed 11,000 people in a country with a population of >200 million over 30 years is a ‘ginormous outbreak’?
This kind of hyper-scary overreaction from the CDC official being quoted and other government agents is a big cause of the current loss of trust in those institutions.
A few years ago monkeypox was gonna kill all of us and our dogs, I get “extreme heat” and “severe weather” warnings for days where the weather is 20* below the annual peak in my home town, and now a fungus is going to kill me and my cats.
I think quoting is fine, but it's surprising coming from a senior adviser at a U.S. Government department.
> “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
I agree even though I use ginormous in normal conversation. In the right context it is fine, I just don't think this is the right context.
I also find it hard to take an article seriously when its volume comparison employs "Olympic-sized swimming pools". I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership, which I hope they measure realistically under the assumption that the number of readers will always be close to half the number of eyeballs on the page. Otherwise they would be inflating readership and that would be misleading.
> I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership
At least in the US, "Olympic sized swimming pool" is as common a unit of measure as a US football field - very commonly used.
I agree. It is common to see those used as area and volume examples. I think it is far less common for the audience to have a clear mental picture of the two terms though. It's easier for a football field to serve as a reference because more people have exposure to football fields. It is more difficult for an Olympic sized swimming pool to serve as a reference because there are fewer people who have seen one in person.
I think it is a bit comical to use swimming pools as a volumetric reference when most people's experience with swimming pools has been in a back yard setting or on visits to community pools, which may be any convenient size.
It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.
Everything is spreading. We're a large interconnected world, and we'll inherit everyone's problems eventually. There are better alternatives, but it's not something people will seriously consider.
A system that prices in cost of negative externalities is better than what we have now. A system that caps how much wealth a person can have is a better system that what we now have. A system that prevents the exportation of pollution is a better system than what we have now.
These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.
Do you live in the American continent? Look at the skin tone of most people you find in the streets. Go to a library and try to find out what was the average skin tone in your region 600 years ago. Compare both.
Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has always been a part of our civilization.
Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.
Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.
We are in the midst of a great extinction event. It’s the only extinction event caused by one species. We are quite bad for the planet’s ecosystem and things like factory farming of cows and pigs cause great suffering. Having far fewer humans on the planet would be a great benefit to other species and to humanity.
There's no such thing as introducing species where they don't belong. Ecosystem are dynamic, several other animals serve as vectors for transporting species from a place to another.
There's no such thing as a long term static equilibria where godess gaia looks like a Jehova's witnesses book illustration. This is an incredibly cultish and misanthropic position.
This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.
We will see more and more fungi infecting mammals in the coming years. Mammals and birds evolved higher body temperatures in part to protect from fungal infections. As most fungi are dying above 37°C. But a high temperature summer is a selection pressure on any mushroom trying to survive, and hence might evolve to survive 40° summers and thus also survive in our bodies.
I really hope cordyceps is one of the last to do this step.
Not sure about that. Outside temperature above 37 were common in many highly populated areas, even before "high temperature summer" (e.g., India, Indonesia, most of Brazil, etc.). If there was an actual selection pressure, we would have seen its results by now.
We have already seen selection pressure results in Candida auris
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01397-19 (2019)
https://radiolab.org/podcast/fungus-amungus (2020)
Would a daily peak above 37C counts for the parents point? It has to be longer term temperature I imagine.
One of the last, you say? The last of Us?
Turned this into a short video using Chat Octopus: https://chatoctopus.com/share/07b91771-abee-469c-a68f-3e4f79...
Chat transcript: https://chatoctopus.com/share/chat/135165e4-d38a-46c2-83a3-4...
What does this add to the conversation? It's hardly a summary, and not to be too judgy but seems like a third-grader's PowerPoint - just showing images that reflect exactly what it's telling me (both in audio and in text).
> “I’m convinced that half of the human cases that come from cats are people who are trying to stuff pills down their cat’s throats to treat the sporotrichosis,”
Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food. Problem solved. Difficult with multiple cats but I had two and one needed medication so I put this little guys on a window sill he loved to perch on which the other cat didn't care to reach.
This doesn’t necessarily work. Some pills taste bad, and the cat will refuse weird-tasting food.
I recommend everyone who has healthy cats to talk to their vet about administering empty capsules. Just so you and the cat get comfortable with the process before you need it.
Kind of like you need to train them from an early age that clipping their nails is fine.
When your cat gets old, they will need to take oral supplements, at the very least. You’re the person they trust the most to give them.
Maybe mix it with cat nip. My Mom used to have to mix medicine in with the pig's feed. They were very good at eating around the medicine. To get around that she would prepare a concoction of beer and molasses and feed and the medicine. They then ate all of it.
> When your cat gets old
> You’re the person they trust the most
-_- Gave my spry lil five year old critter a hug. He doesn't deserve to get old.
Its not always that easy. For example cerenia tastes very bitter for a cat. My cat will start drooling almost uncontrollably if he tastes it. He has a kidney condition and needs it for the rest of his life. I've tried crushing it, but he will then just ignore the food because of the bitter taste of the pill. Putting it in something like easy-pill will work a couple of times. Until he realizes the disgusting taste he is going to experience when eating the easy-pill. At that point you can't trick him anymore with an easy-pill.
So the only way I can give it to him (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth so he never tastes it and immediately swallows it.
Some drugs are available online / locally through compounding pharmacies as transdermal creams that you apply to the inner surface of the cat's ear.
From a quick search, it looks like cerenia is available in this form.
Your last sentence, "[pilling cat] (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth" must mean you have a very chill cat [emphasis mine].
I may be crazy but I feel like we shouldn't be giving medicine to animals with communicable diseases (unless the medicine reduces the chances of animal->human transmission). We're just reducing the effectiveness of these medicines over time.
To some extent, maybe.
Although, it needs to be balanced against other options. I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive but we have:
* Medicine
* Uncontrolled spread
* Somehow modify the animals’ behavior to spread illnesses less
* Wipe out infected animals
2 and 4 seem less than desirable. 3… I mean “herding cats” is an expression for a reason, right? They are not very obedient in general.
Is there a good option I missed?
Citation needed.
We ought to have learned after the Covid “herd immunity” policies that killed hundreds of thousands around the world, that infectious disease control should be grounded on actual research, and not on simplified world models.
Researchers currently recommend treatment.
I think they meant to cull them
I understand, didn’t mean to imply they were suggesting herd immunity. But then you’ll have people not taking their cats to the vet because they don’t want them to be culled, increasing exposure and limiting our access to reliable data.
My point is, take this uninformed opinion that goes against the researchers’ recommendation for what it is: wrong.
Most people now treat pets as children, expensive surgeries even are commonplace. Good luck convincing them not to medicate their pet when a medicine for the disease exists
A. I have cats that don't go anywhere special that the other cats don't go so that doesn't work unless I supervise. B. It's difficult to make sure they get the entire dose, again unless you supervise. And good luck getting a cat to finish food they've decided they are done with. C. I have cats that are picky enough to ignore any food that has a crushed pill in it. They can always tell. Yes even if I use smelly food. D. Not all medications can be safely crushed. Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery.
> Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery.
Depends on the coating - some coatings only dissolve once they are out of the strongly acidic stomach. Slow dissolution is used in retarded medication, which may or may not be coincident with targeting post-stomach delivery.
Yeah I was trying to get the general point of "crushing the pill could interfere with effective delivery of the medicine" without getting too far into the weeds. Honestly it's usually fine and I do think mixing crushed pills with food is an important tool in a pet owners belt. It's just not the universal solution that was being implied.
Pill pocket treats have been great for this exact purpose.
None of my cats would eat those. Regular soft cat treats have always worked better.
When I had to give my cats thyroid pills, I mushed them into soft treats. This generally worked, but sometimes took a couple of tries. But this trick only works if the cat wants the treat more than they don't want the pill. A dog can be tricked into thinking the pill is the treat.
Flavored pill compounding is apparently also an option, but I've never tried it.
> Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food.
This does not work on compounds sensitive to stomach acids. Some medications (both veterinarian and human) have to be specially coated to survive this environment [1], if you crush the pills the medication gets less effective, completely ineffective or, like ibuprofen, irritate the stomach. Or, worst case, the medication is designed for retarded release in the stomach acid - and now that you've crushed it, the entirety of the compound is dissolved in the stomach at once.
Please always ask your veterinarian/physician, the pharmacy staff and always read the medication's application notes because particularly physicians often are unaware and the same ingredient on the prescription might be fulfilled by a crushable or a non-crushable variant which only the pharmacist knows.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magensaftresistente_Tablette
The article doesn't address treatment efficacy in humans. How is it treated? How effective is the treatment? Can this develop resistance to the treatment? The spread mechanisms and persistence are concerning, but without info on treatment I'm not sure how much I should freak out about this.
Candida is already antifungal resistant in many cases, or so I remember reading.
Here’s the website (in Portuguese) from the Brazilian Ministry of Health: https://www.gov.br/saude/pt-br/assuntos/saude-de-a-a-z/e/esp...
It includes instructions for the general population and for medical professionals, as well as a couple of technical reports with tons of references to recent studies.
Deadly to immunocompromised people. Basically everything could be deadly to them. Cats also rarely attack human proactively. So not really a big concern.
It can be airborne, lives on sanitized surfaces for up to 10 weeks, and may take 3 years for symptoms to appear.
Still, it is more concerning for cats than humans.
Hypochlorous acid (HOCl) is highly effective at killing Sporothrix fungi, including Sporothrix brasiliensis
HOCl is the best non-toxic broad spectrum human compatible antimicrobial. I have been using it in many household applications since COVID started.
It can be prepared by electrolysis of acidified (e.g. vinegar, but ideally pH 5.5, and inorganic acids make it last way longer at that pH, but they are more dangerous to handle) salt water (high margin of safety) or alternatively prepared by mixing highly diluted bleach with an diluted acid (low margin of safety) to target 20-2000 ppm depending on your delivery method (e.g. one tablespoon of bleach and vinegar into a gallon of water). If you are worried about the safety of this approach, note that far, far less chlorine gas is emitted when made this way than by ordinary bathroom cleaning with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner.
The smell of HOCl is unique and completely different from chlorine gas. The small amount of chlorine gas emitted likes to sit on top of the surface of the water, but if this layer is blown away, the distinct smell of HOCl becomes apparent immediately. It smells like minty bubblegum or something more familiar: a swimming pool.
The good news is when making HOCl for disinfection purposes 20-2000 ppm, only very small quantities of chlorine gas are evolved. They can be reduced further by shaking the closed container used to make it, further dissolving the gas into solution to make more HOCl.
I run this solution in my humidifier at low concentrations to prevent microorganisms from growing in it. I also use the electrolysis method to accurately make very low concentrations for nasal rinses. Typically, 15-30 seconds from a $10 USB electrolyzer in salt water.
"AI Overview" blithely tells me HOCL can be easily made from the electrolysis of salt water.
Looking even a little deeper (Wikipedia) confirms that chlorine chemistry, especially when combined with electrolysis, is very complex, and it's hard to know if you're making the right thing. FWIW every sensible electrolysis-based DIY project has dire warnings about electrolysing solutions of common salt.
Looks like HOCL generators are household appliances now.
> it's hard to know if you're making the right thing
In this case, it's not complicated
Hypochlolorous acid, otherwise known as "swimming pool water"
Can survive weeks, months and even years??
That’s a little horrifying.
My cat's got a different kind of fungus, not sporotrichosis, but one that gives her sort of a "clown nose". We've been trying to treat it for years now and it always comes back. Every time the treatment takes 4-6 months with itraconazol.
Reminds me of the TV Series "The Last of us" [0], which: "... is set decades after the collapse of society caused by a mass fungal infection that transforms its hosts into zombie-like creatures". Of course, minus the zombies.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)
We are lucky that mass epidemics that plagued humans so far didn't affect the brain. Affections like rabies, that require individuals biting each other, and which are the inspirational source of all those zombie fantasies, do not count. That is an attack vector easy to spot and manage. The scary scenario is the one like with this Sporothrix Brasiliensis fungus, which can spread by merely "sneezing out the infectious yeast", and then remain potent (outside a host) for "up to 10 weeks", plus (the cherry on top) -- "developing the disease three years after" the infection event. Any kind of pandemic is scary by the sheer magnitude of its reach, but one that would affect the brain? That would be another level of scary.
Toxoplasma gondii affects animal behavior, I don't think it's a stretch to think it (or something similar) could affect humans in some way we haven't measured yet.
I think it’s very common for parasites to affect their host’s behavior.
If you find this topic interesting, I recommend the book “Parasite Rex”
I think this is widely speculated already, right? It is just hard to measure human behavior. I mean one of the proposed effects on Wikipedia is a reduced aversion to cat urine. But obviously there is a correlation/causation question there, haha,
In the opening scene a scientist argues once the ambient temperature of some region is 37°C we'll all get eaten by fungus. It will evolve to live at body temperature.
There are some precedents for this: hibernating bats lower their body temperature to that of a moldy environment, and are getting infected with a fungus which kills 90% of them in some cases [2]. Logic goes that raising the ambient temperature could be the same (with some evolution thrown in) as lowering our body temperature.
Is it credible? No idea, not that kind of scientist.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLNagvJHl3g
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome
You mean the video games?
There is also a TV adaptation that came out on Netflix a few years ago.
I guess GP is hinting that referring to TLoS as a TV series is a bit similar to, say, referring to LotR as a movie series (when discussing the basic premise shared by the original and the adaptation).
Reminds me of this scene: https://clip.cafe/airheads-1994/uh-67-copies-of-moby-dick/?s...
It's HBO Original actually
Please note that this is an extremely rare disease even in Brazil, where it came from. Asked my vet, and two cousins who also are vets, and all of them knew of the disease from scientific literature and government health bulletins, but only one of them had treated two actual cases, when he lived in northeastern region: two strays.
Brasil must have something like between 40 and 50 million cats (including strays). An infectious disease that killed thousands (what the article means? 1000, 2000? 10000?) while not ignorable, it is not exactly highly prevalent.
It is not that rare, the epidemic is just focused on the south region right now.
Porto Alegre metropolitan area is having a huge outbreak. My girlfriend is a vet and has been dealing with new cases multiple times a week.
Many of our friends also got it (it is very hard to not get scratched when handling with cats in pain).
It is a really really shitty, painful and hard to treat disease, requiring multiple months of treatment. It is very painful but usually not letal for humans and cats that are in the earlier stages and get treatment.
However it is absolutely lethal for populations of wild and stray cats, as it is very infectious and 100% lethal unassisted.
There’s also not enough data to say the number of human cases has been growing YOY because compulsory notification in Brazil only started in 2025.
"We report the first three cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis outside South America, and the first ever cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis *in the United Kingdom*".
Why are we allowing immigrant cats into the country?
For the same reason we allow expat cats into the country.
For the immigrants to eat ofcourse! /s
>infect cats
No! We must stop this at all costs
>and people
Eh, all right then. If it takes the cats out at least we'd be going with them
can fungals go pandemic?
We need lock downs, a wall, 100% containment. Full vaccine mobilization. Starship must be expedited. A world without cats is not a world at all.
A world with cats is a world with billions of dead birds and small mammals.
Without them we will have even more insects.
So this time cats won’t protect us from diseases by killing the carrier, these time they help the carriers
Or killing them in the US will allow bird populations to recover, leading to birds killing more insects. Cats are not native to the Americas.
Cats are very native to the Americas.
Just not housecats.
They still kill carriers for other stuff. Pick your poison, I guess.
Wouldn’t we have less insects because of increased bird, rodent and spider growth?
Less insecticide is probably the key thing.
Driving in the eighties with windscreens full of insects, and now hardly anything, and a lot less of the things that lived on them.
Sometimes I wonder about that. The measure is number of insect impacts on windshields but is the car the same?
If we use a more modern care would the increased aerodynamics prevent impacts as instead of punching through the air you are cutting through it?
Have never read the full experimental setup and assumptions... I do know that I have less dead bug then when I was a kid...
Ever since I started riding a motorcycle I've started to believe this to be the case too. I get so many bug splats on my helmet, jacket, and motorcycle that I'd never have if I was driving a car. By the end of most rides out in the country on the highway I'm covered in splats.
i've noted less bugs on the windshield but about the same on the optics and the radiator screen, so i go with the aerodynamics explanation as well. bugs are there because i see the bug swarms around the road too.
"Them" refers to birds and small mammals and "even more" refers to the consequences of climate change where insects have more habitable areas.
Pets are slaves. Stop trying to own emotions.
Dogs have owners, cats have staff.
More like cats enslaved humans
Genuinely curious - are sheep kept for their wool also slaves in your opinion?
There is a ballot measure this Fall in Oregon that would ban pet and livestock ownership in the state. The backers got over 100,000 people to sign the petition.
There are people that either simply do not understand the natural order that the majority of humans want to eat meat and keep pets, or they do not care about other people enough to respect their lifestyle choices.
So a disease that has killed 11,000 people in a country with a population of >200 million over 30 years is a ‘ginormous outbreak’?
This kind of hyper-scary overreaction from the CDC official being quoted and other government agents is a big cause of the current loss of trust in those institutions.
A few years ago monkeypox was gonna kill all of us and our dogs, I get “extreme heat” and “severe weather” warnings for days where the weather is 20* below the annual peak in my home town, and now a fungus is going to kill me and my cats.
Ok boomer - just stop worrying please?
Infected 11,000, not killed.
From what I can tell, deaths are in the dozens (over 30 years).
I’m worried about the cats, though.
If it had killed 11,000 people we’d be hearing much more about it. It made news that Ebola hit a record high of 1,000 cases this week.
It's hard to take an article that uses the word 'ginormous' seriously
I think quoting is fine, but it's surprising coming from a senior adviser at a U.S. Government department.
> “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The article doesn’t. It quotes a CDC advisor who does.
I agree even though I use ginormous in normal conversation. In the right context it is fine, I just don't think this is the right context.
I also find it hard to take an article seriously when its volume comparison employs "Olympic-sized swimming pools". I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership, which I hope they measure realistically under the assumption that the number of readers will always be close to half the number of eyeballs on the page. Otherwise they would be inflating readership and that would be misleading.
> I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership
At least in the US, "Olympic sized swimming pool" is as common a unit of measure as a US football field - very commonly used.
I agree. It is common to see those used as area and volume examples. I think it is far less common for the audience to have a clear mental picture of the two terms though. It's easier for a football field to serve as a reference because more people have exposure to football fields. It is more difficult for an Olympic sized swimming pool to serve as a reference because there are fewer people who have seen one in person.
I think it is a bit comical to use swimming pools as a volumetric reference when most people's experience with swimming pools has been in a back yard setting or on visits to community pools, which may be any convenient size.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.
Technical jargon like "gigantic" or "enormous"?
Here in Scotland, 'ginormous' is normal, possibly more regularly used than 'enormous' or 'giant'.
Everything is spreading. We're a large interconnected world, and we'll inherit everyone's problems eventually. There are better alternatives, but it's not something people will seriously consider.
Please name a better alternative, I'm very curious.
A system that prices in cost of negative externalities is better than what we have now. A system that caps how much wealth a person can have is a better system that what we now have. A system that prevents the exportation of pollution is a better system than what we have now.
These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.
One where people don't travel very much.
Do you live in the American continent? Look at the skin tone of most people you find in the streets. Go to a library and try to find out what was the average skin tone in your region 600 years ago. Compare both.
Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has always been a part of our civilization.
Don't be ominous. Just say things or refrain from posting.
What are the alternatives people rather avoid considering?
Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.
You first?
Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.
We are in the midst of a great extinction event. It’s the only extinction event caused by one species. We are quite bad for the planet’s ecosystem and things like factory farming of cows and pigs cause great suffering. Having far fewer humans on the planet would be a great benefit to other species and to humanity.
Dont worry! With AI powered robotics it’ll only take a tiny fraction of humans to create many times more ‘impact’!
Sorry if that wasn't obvious, I wasn't proposing it, I just wanted to come up with an example of a solution that "no one would seriously consider".
There's no such thing as introducing species where they don't belong. Ecosystem are dynamic, several other animals serve as vectors for transporting species from a place to another. There's no such thing as a long term static equilibria where godess gaia looks like a Jehova's witnesses book illustration. This is an incredibly cultish and misanthropic position.
This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.
Probably something about walls or methods used by political systems that built walls.
Not having cats is an option that is not seriously considered.
Dogs are even worse. Make them shit in your own backyard please.
If you are a city dweller please do not keep “pets”, it’s bloody ridiculous, thank you.
We've been keeping pets as a species for considerably longer than we've had cities. It's basically an ingrained part of how we react to animals now.
In dwarf fortress you can have dragons as pets. Never got there, tho I think I will train dogs in my current fortress.
Sadly not known to breathe fire, but on the plus side, less likely to burn your house down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogona
Beyond that, longer than we've had the written word.
Domestication of animals might be the single greatest achievement of humans.
Aren't cities older than writing?
Keeping an animal that defecates indoors and allowing it contact with food prep area is obscene.
Obscene is the right word because it's quite manageable in health terms, it just feels bad to you.
You seem to think humans keep cats as pets, which indicates you've never lived with a cat before.
Cats have standards that prevent that person from getting hired as a servant.