Sort of weird to limit the Human category to, apparently, conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism. Also, it's horrible that conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism are in the same ballpark as traffic deaths.
The human category is limited, I believe, to intentional killing. Otherwise you open up a whole can of worms about macroeconomic trolley problems. (Am I killing people right now by making insufficiently-optimal donations to charity?)
It doesn’t have to be this abstract, though. This will likely change in the next 20 years.
Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.
It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.
This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.
Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.
It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.
I don’t disagree with the principles you’re standing up for here; but we’re not having an ethical argument, we’re talking about what went into the author’s analysis. And AFAICT, in said analysis, they just took for “human deaths caused by humans”, the set of deaths where one human thought “I want that other human to die”, and then caused that to happen. Situations with legal mens rea for killing.
Ok, but that makes it incompatible for comparison with the other animals killing humans. In some cases maybe (sharks, wolves, lions, crocodiles) the animal could be actively wanting the human to die, but in others (freshwater snails, tapeworms, mosquitoes), that's probably not the case.
Peace talks sometimes work. Asking sharks to tone down the chomping does not. There is no point to differentiating ‘attack vs incidental’ animal deaths in the same way as w humans...
I feel like maybe I misread your post. Perhaps I didn't understand the larger point you were making.
> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.
> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.
Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.
> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.
I'm not sure if you are equating horses and cars or not. Are you saying the risk of either is unacceptable?
I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.
Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.
I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.
> In particular, the police ride them during public events.
Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally
Presumably if you're speeding or driving while intoxicated, you're doing so intentionally. It's not as if someone is forcing you to drive too fast or too drunk. These things (especially speeding) dramatically increase the likelihood of being in a collision.
While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.
Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.
At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"
"Malfeasance" is the general term for doing something bad (usually professionally) for your own gain (or your own laziness), that can end up harming others, but where this is not the goal per se, just something that is an "acceptable loss" for your gain. An engineer who doesn't bother to verify the safety of a design before signing off on it, is committing malfeasance.
We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.
Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.
Your aim isn't to kill anybody. A careless maintenance worker in a factory also doesn't intent to kill someone when he intentionally skips a job. Or a shopkeeper when he sells cigarettes to a customer. You would end up including nearly all deaths as caused by humans if you go down that road. The bus driver who gave an overweight person a ride instead of making them walk.
Well, my point was that most automobile collisions aren't 'accidents' in the true sense of the word, and most automobile related injuries (and deaths) occur when someone does something negligent. The vast majority of collisions are caused by some combination of being distracted, intoxication, speeding, or just being reckless. Deaths (or serious injuries for that matter) rarely occur at low speeds, it's most often in situations that involve speeding.
There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].
But how do you exclude all those other causes? We know that cigarettes kill people too so if you intentionally sell them to somebody, you're being reckless or negligent too. It's a continuum so where do you draw the line? At breaking the law? That's arbitrary and depends on the country.
Based on the statistics I have seen, if the US took Sweden's approach to the current epidemic (which has been recently held up as a model on HN and elsewhere) and got similar results, an additional 30,000 people would have died thus far. I haven't seen anyone bring this up and ask for an accounting of the benefit that is greater.
While there has been a high death rate in Sweden, especially in elderly homes which weren't isolated properly, you have to be careful when comparing stats between countries. Sweden seems to file more deaths as COVID, instead of just attributing it as death by age, heart attack, or some other unexplained reason, including those dying in elderly care and not only those in hospitals.
Ranking countries is not the point; the point is that people who endlessly lecture on why the US is inferior have no particular preference for whether 30,000 more or fewer Americans die, so rhetoric pretending to be concerned about highway deaths seems vapid and insincere.
You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.
Agreed. If you just believed it all, you'd think Nordic countries never do anything wrong and other countries should just do what they do. But they're in a league of their own. And sorry to say but it's minor leagues in the world stage. You can't just mimic what might work there if you're in a completely different league.
Inventing just about everything ever? America also has 50% more GDP per capita than the UK. Perhaps the extra 200% traffic deaths are needed to provide that boost.
I'm not going to argue this directly, but I can provide evidence of how vital I think ordinary people consider highway transportation. It reminds me of a scandal in the US that you may or may not have heard of:
The traffic, and suicides, are the two main dangerous things for younger people in non-malaria and not-a-war zones.
I was in an a little bit conflict zone recently, and people asked if I was worried and said I should be careful. They didn't know -- the local people living there -- that the traffic is 100 times more dangerous than the slightly ongoing conflict. They just look at the news and feel worried about whatever the newspapers write about, which is _not_ the traffic.
I think people would realize they're not that different from those other people in that other place -- they all share the same main problems.
And maybe people would realize they're being manipulated by media and the "presidents" who own the media -- those presidents tend to get more votes, the more afraid people are for each other.
> collective psychological effect
Maybe peace?
And fewer traffic accidents, more subways and trains. Better mental care
Personally I think they should just skip the human category. I mean, if I die of old age aren't I sort of being killed by a human? ok maybe that is a stretch, but how about if I catch the flu from another person? Is it the flu or the other person that got me?
Here is what the article from worldatlas.com meant, in context:
> Approximately 475,000 people die every year at the hand of fellow man. In a world filled with conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism, this is unfortunately not that surprising. Deaths among humans are intentional and pre-calculated making them beyond tragic.
I used to belive that, but I have since come to believe that the explanatory variable in vicious dog attacks are the type of owners, and the breeders who supply those owners, not dog breed. If you banned pitbulls they would just switch to buying and abusing alsatians.
I've been around many alsatians, and many pitbulls (never had one, but many friends have). Given equal training, equal education (or whatever you want to call what some people do to their dogs), most pitbulls will be different from alsatians in temperament. When they are in attack mode, they're much more likely to not let go, and to bite much harder. There's a spectrum among breeds regarding the agressiveness of their attacks, and that's something you can't argue, I think. You can abuse the hell out of Yorkshire Terriers, they just won't be as dangerous as pitbulls.
I was once in a hand to hand struggle with a pit bull that attacked another smaller dog. At least three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release the smaller dog.
The only way to dissuade the pit, after what was at least a couple of minutes of this and with the smaller dog being disemboweled, was that I stabbed the pit bull in the neck with my pocket knife.
Their physical power and stubbornness should not be taken for granted.
The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I did finally get its attention.
Stabbing the pit bull ended the attack within seconds. My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation.
Another bystander took the small dog and its owner to the pet hospital in her car where emergency surgery saved its life.
I'm not sure the eventual fate of the pit bull but I know that it was turned over to the custody of the local SPCA and the owner was given some type of citation.
Interesting that you and other comments took mine to mean how to train a dog, which is irrelevant to the situation under consideration. Did any of y'all mean that in good faith?
No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts of those involved made the situation worse before it was made better. And based on the new facts, starting with the owner.
Just as with humans, there's a well understood hierarchy of severity of tools for handling situations such as that one, though only a small minority of dog owners know them. It's incredibly unfortunate that dog lives are more or less toys for humans to play with, otherwise this fight is likely to never have happened if it was a severe as you say before it turned into a five animal brawl.
Bottom line the three of you DID make it worse before it was made better. The punching and kicking won't help in all probability. It's simply not on the spectrum of effective tools. Killing is on the far end, so I'm not begrudging your actions, I'm begrudging the behavior before it: yelling (probably), kicking, and punching instead of forcing the bite, wheelbarrowing, and other environmental tools that may have been available. Y'know, the things that animal behaviorists have figured out, how to cause specific behaviors, like stopping a dog from biting another during a fight.
I'm not sure why I wrote this comment since apparently your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog. You managed to stop the fight without causing death, a huge win, but you wish otherwise. I sincerely hope your future is brighter than your past.
Nope, this was more like a 10 year old being savagely beaten by a 30 year old very strong, very violent, out of his mind MMA fighter who wanted to kill the 10 year old.
What you're saying makes sense for some breeds. The whole point was that pitbulls are more agressive and violent than other breeds.
I did the wheelbarrowing thing from the start. That only took leverage off of the small dog to try to give the other people who enough time to try to dissuade the pit bull, but as I said, nothing distracted it from its purpose until I stabbed it. It was obvious when I was able to see the intestines of the small dog exposed that it was going to not last long and my resolve was to try to kill the aggressor if one was going to die for sure at that point.
We seem to be talking past each other as at this point I suspect we're in agreement. My initial claim was that punching, kicking, and stabbing were ineffective at breaking up dog fights and make them worse. I back-pedaled slightly to say that stabbing (lethal actions) is effective if it's a scenario where non-lethal tools prove ineffective.
My biggest issue from the start was the socialization of "three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release," which failed, predictably, and I didn't want anyone to think that that was a good thing to try in the first place.
Yes I agree about us having some difficulty in properly communicating what's going on. It was a very dynamic situation. It was just a bunch of passers by jumping in to help in whatever way they were able or thought appropriate at the moment.
I don't know what would have been, so to speak, appropriate and would have been effective. The one thing I knew to try was to do the wheelbarrow and that did nothing at leas in attitude of the pit bull. I was totally focused on my not being excessively injured or letting the other dog be torn apart and didn't organize anyone else's interaction, like "I'll hold the legs and you kick it."
If anything it was the opposite of bystander syndrome where everyone thinks someone else will do whatever is needed. Everyone there was doing whatever they could with the tools and knowledge or lack of knowledge that they had.
Their intent was to stop a dog from killing another dog, you are discussing the method of doing so as if it was the only stated goal. "I just wanted to kill a pitbull doing nothing minding it's own business".
Why do you think such a terrible leap of logic would work here?
Well, he wasn't a dog behaviorist, and he's not required to know how to adequately deal with vicious dogs trying to tear apart little ones. Stabbing the pitbull saved the other dog's life.
Why did you change your belief? I've heard both beliefs too but never seen evidence for the blame-the-owner one so I'm never sure.
I hope your logic is not: "I can imagine how A might cause X, therefore I believe B cannot possibly cause X." Easy way for people too fool themselves into believing unsupported ideas.
There are a lot of bad pit bull owners that abuse their dogs and make them aggressive.
Pit bulls are stronger and more capable of injuring or killing a human than most other breeds.
Both can be true. But if you want the "bad owner" theory to explain why 80% of all fatalities are pit-related , you are essentially calling at 80% percent (or higher) of owners dangerously negligent.
The numbers don't relate perfectly, but the point stands. By failing to address what i'm actually saying, it's your straw-man of "the math doesn't work" that is distracting the conversation.
Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.
This is complete nonsense from dogsbite.org actually nobody tracks this. This "statistic" is at best comprised by trying to compile news articles that notoriously misidentify any large breed mutt responsible for attacks as pit bulls.
2. If 80% of fatal are attacks are caused by pit bulls and negligent owners were the cause of attacks then 80% of owners must be negligent.
3. 80% of owners being negligent is an absurd conclusion thus the conclusion that bites are largely caused by negligent owners must be false.
Premise 2 is the result of what I like to call number gluing. To explicate people have 2 entities which they can attach a numerical identity to that seem related so people just mentally stick them together instead of doing the mathematical reasoning to figure out how the 2 relate. It's not that they don't "exactly" relate how you said they do they don't relate AT ALL. With no other numbers its entirely impossible to reason about which portion of owners are negligent or even how their average negligence relates to owners of say rottweilers and dobermans. There are 3.6 million pit bulls in the US and 40 people are killed annually. Even if every fatality was caused by a pit bull we could conclude from that fact that 1 in a million pit bull owners are negligent. The prior poster wasn't distracting from your argument he demolished it like a bulldozer.
1. The statistics are 80% pits and pit breed derivatives. You are welcome to argue against facts and statistics but I wont be joining you.
2. Shifting all the blame onto owners is ignoring the clear trend. If 100% of gun owners were safe and responsible, there would still be gun deaths because of the capacity of a gun to kill someone. Same with Pits.
3. I agree but that's your logic, not mine.
You are also shifting focus from Pits attacking other dogs (the point of this thread) to attacking people. Fine, they account for most dog attacks on other dogs and on people. You seem to have your own justifications for why that is, and why it's ok, but those only work on you. Because you want to believe your Pitbull is an angel from heaven and not a well trained, but inherently dangerous animal.
"Pictured are the two most deadly dog breeds in America: pit bull terriers and rottweilers. Research from DogsBite.org shows that during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, canines killed 471 Americans. Pit bulls and rottweilers accounted for 76% (358) of these deaths."
> Restricting breed ownership has not reduced the incidence of dog bites. A survey of reported dog bite rates in 36 Canadian municipalities found no difference between jurisdictions with BSL and those without. Likewise, a 2010 Toronto Humane Society survey found no change in dog bites in Ontario in the years before and after Ontario’s BSL.
> Calgary, however, saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years – from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006. Rather than banning breeds, Calgary uses strong licensing and enforcement plus dog safety public education campaigns.
It would be great if you stopped promoting strategies that don't work and started promoting ones that do.
Dogsbite is a worthless source. You yourself aren't being consistent in your arguments. First it was pit bulls were responsible for 80% of fatalities and now its pits and rottweilers are responsible for 76. Would you like to settle on "big dogs are the ones that normally manage to kill people" and include 2 or 3 more large breeds?
Looking at the link it relies on news paper stories to report that the death happened and then uses the reporters words to correctly identify the breed even though this may actually result in pit bulls being over counted and some fatalities being missed. In fact if you peruse the source its sufficient for an attack to be pit bull related for any given source to refer to the dogs as pit bulls. So if a dozen sources report on the matter and one misidentifies the culprit as a pit bull pit bull kill it is. As an example I found in the first dozen cases a "pit bull kill" wherein nobody saw the person get killed but a neighbor testified that there were problematic dogs in the neighborhood which the neighbor says are pit bulls. I found another which was a literal homicide in which the murderers dog attacked the victim while he was murdering them. It's hard to justify digging through 400 some cases when 1/6th of the first 12 are obviously complete nonsense and the rest are of unknown quality without extensive research not composed of finding newspaper articles and grepping for the word pit in any article about a particular incident.
The citations show the article title but not a url to the actual source making identifying just how bad the source in unnecessarily cumbersome but anyone that spends more than 5 minutes studying it ought to come to the conclusion that dogsbite.org is shockingly not even trying to do an unbiased analysis. It's a hit piece serving the interests of a lobbying group of dog haters who in many cases want to steal people's family pets and kill them to address a problem that kills about the same number of people annually as drowning in bath tubs.
Usually only having one biased source of truth is an indication that you are hanging out with the flat earth society. I invite you to join the rest of us on the round earth.
If you are going to grab your tin foil hat and claim an internet-wide conspiracy against your dog of choice, fine. I don't see any reason to participate.
We know they exist. The point of the conversation is how prevalent they are (what you’re inflating), and how much of the behavior is attributable to the dog’s nature (in my opinion, near none; pit bulls are naturally sweet and playful).
Their "nature" is to hunt and kill things. They have the size and ferocity other breeds don't have. The fact that you have trained yours to pose for cute photos and play with your kids is the weird thing here.
That is not a nature unlike any other dog. Nor are pit bulls the biggest or most ferocious, not even close. Even a cursory glance at dog breeds reveals much bigger threats.
Many dogs involved in attacks are erroneously typed as pitbulls (which is, in fact, a designation encompassing at least 3 different distinct breeds); genetic testing later reveals that they were not. Pitbulls are the "Moors" of dog breeds.
I suspect dogs aren’t particularly deadly, it’s just that there are so many of them and they collectively spend so much time near humans. Sharks on the other hand almost never interact with humans.
Whenever I talk to people that think it would be cool to have a pet tiger, I tell that to imagine what a pet cat can do to a person. Now imagine if it was 500 pounds. And this is with an animal that has been domesticated for thousands of years.
Well, think about it. A mosquito bite seems harmless, while getting torn to pieces by a shark, in a medium where you cannot even run it is scary as hell.
North American and Western European audiences don't realise that while 1 dog can only sometimes hurt you, a pack of 8-10 non-rabid dogs can hunt an adult human down and kill them easily.
In countries around the world, it's more about packs of wild dogs and rabies, instead of just rabies alone.
Countries/Regions that have wild dog pack problems: India, Some Eastern European countries, South East Asia (almost all people who grew up in South Eastern Asia would have a childhood story of being followed home by a pack of dogs. They are quiet at the beginning, they follow you, and if no one else is home when you get there, LOCK THE DOOR and God protect you), some parts of Australia.
My father grew up in rural India, has zero faith in dogs, and always carries a wooden cane on his daily walks to this day.
Growing up, I was ashamed that my dad was so scared of dogs, but the dogs he grew up around were incredibly violent and unpredictable compared to the domestics we’re so accustomed to here in the States. I think he and his brothers raised a puppy they found in the village, and it bit him pretty terribly when it grew up, so he has zero trust for animals. And he’s the most rational man I know, so it was weird to see him carry this memory so strongly into his 50s and 60s.
I don’t think he’s ever used it before (he lives in the Bay Area), but he’ll literally turn back from 5 blocks away if he realizes he’s forgotten it. I guess I’m trying to say: these kinds of environments are really traumatizing, and you should totally believe what the parent is saying. It’s a different world out there.
I had to regularly face down packs of wild dogs in India, probably the scariest thing I’ll do in my life. A trick my friend showed me in Greece (this was after India and wouldn’t have applied) was if you see a group of dogs at a distance and they seem threatening or interested, then bend down and pretend to pick up stone and they’ll back off.
I'm thinking, that data is more of a heat-map of interactions. Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins. So as a per-capita, they might be near 100%?
I'm not sure. Plenty of people swim in waters where sharks are regularly observed. And still the attacks are low. And further, with many attacks, I think in particular great-whites, they back off after the first bite, which allows for much greater survivability. So the ratio of "shark contact" to "sharks win" is probably low. And if you also add in fishing for sharks (such as for fins) humans probably kill a lot more sharks than the other way around.
Certainly the amount of contact plays a roll. That's why dogs are so much higher than wolves for instance. But it's also true that most of the time people spend swimming around sharks, they don't get bitten. How the ratio of attacks to contacts compares between sharks and dogs or other animals I don't know; agreed that would be somewhat interesting!
I've dived with sharks for years now. Most of them are some of the gentlest, shiest creatures in the water. In years of these interactions, neither I nor the shark won because literally nothing happened. They just run away from you if you get too close.
Most sharks will run away from the human as the human and their bubbles look far bigger than they are. They are more intimidated by us than we are by them.
Uhh, maybe? Shark attacks are quite rare, but I think you might be underestimating how many bites just result in stitches. Talking about "shark attacks" here. Not "Great White shark attacks". Likewise you're certainly underestimating how many airplane "accidents" don't result in any injury (again, not talking about "commercial airline accidents").
My understanding from (very briefly) reading about the insect family Reduviidae is some species are parasitic and spread deadly pathogens much the same way mosquitoes do. It's not the insects themselves killing people, but diseases like Chagas disease (Triatominae is a subfamily of Reduviidae "Assassin Bug"). [1]
The assassin bug is called "vinchuca" in my country, Argentina, and it's a real problem here. There are ways to combat the bug, but once you catch the Chagas disease, there's no cure and you have to live with it. There is only symptomatic treatment as far as I know.
> Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?
I was curious, so:
> Since 2001, the yearly human death toll caused by stings of bees, wasps and hornets in Japan has been ranging between 12 and 26.[26] Since this number also includes deaths caused by wasps, bees, and other hornet species, the number of deaths caused by Asian giant hornets is likely to be significantly lower.[citation needed]
Would love to see statistics from the other perspective: Which animals are killed most by humans? Besides insects, I would guess fish and chicken are quite high...
In that case, depending on the framing, you might care more about the balance of animals killed by humans vs. animals caused-to-exist by humans. (Or you might think both of those things are bad. Negative utilitarians don’t much like chicken farming, given the large number of chicken lives and the large amount of suffering in each life.)
This list isn't really fair. Mosquitoes don't actually kill people, they are just vectors for a disease which does kill people. So then humans should get a point for every death due to flu, AIDS or COVID-19, right? And all the accidental deaths too, because I'm pretty sure the mosquitoes are just living and don't intend to kill anyone. So I think human should be number 1 by a very long way, followed by mosquito.
Is it most mosquitoes, or is it primarily aedis aegypti? I could swear I read that particular species was responsible for most mosquito-bourne disease, but I can't seem to find much information for the proportion between it and other species.
If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save millions of human lives.
From Project Debug, Verily's attempt at reduction of mosquito problems:
https://debug.com/
"""Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined. One species, Aedes aegypti, carries diseases such as dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya which make hundreds of millions of people sick every year"""
The low number of deaths from shark attacks fails to account for the way in which people die from a shark attack: broken in two and eaten alive by a gigantic fish while simultaneously drowning.
This is a horrible way to spend the last few seconds of your life on Earth and it likely triggers all the self-preservation instincts in a human mind, and then some.
The slow, painful death from a debilitating disease like malaria does not even come close for sheer compulsive terror. After all, most people experience sickness at some point during their lives, but very few experience being eaten.
This "raw, visceral horror of being eaten alive by a very big fish" [1] is the reason why people are afraid of shark attacks much more than mosquito bites or even accidents etc.
____________
[1] That's a quote from a National Geographic article I read a few years ago that stuck in my mind. I have no reference to it, apologies. It was in an issue of the print magazine.
And, in the United States - the most lethal animal of all is the ... Deer. (about 120 deaths/year, which shows how safe most Americans are from animals)
... although the Mosquito-related deaths due include a number of viruses, and all of these numbers are from different sources so should be taken with a grain of salt.
These numbers are weird. Why do we count mosquito-borne diseases under mosquitoes but don't put communicable diseases under the tally for humans? It is especially curious considering mosquitoes don't know any better while humans have both the knowledge and ability to dampen how disease spreads through our population.
For one thing, we could conceivably get rid of the mosquitoes if the problem to solve is making life better for humans. However, getting rid of humans to make life better for humans rather defeats the purpose.
Tuberculosis kills almost as many people as the rest of that list combined. It is spread from human to human. There is a vaccine that can help prevent it. If this list was intended to shine light on a fixable problem, TB seems like a much easier problem to solve than eradicating all mosquitoes.
You missed my point. I am asking for consistency in the metrics.
We get malaria from a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes.
We get tuberculosis from a bacteria that is spread by humans.
TB kills more than three times as many people every year as malaria. Why is malaria counted as a death caused by mosquitoes but TB isn't a death caused by humans? Either you count both or you count neither.
It is probably fair to count TB deaths in the "human kills" category, but I think we usually make a differentiation between human to human disease and disease caused by contact with an animal. It's just the way we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Although I get what you're saying, I don't think that human deaths caused by TB is necessarily what people are interested in when you aggregate all of the of humans at the hand of other humans, which may be why those deaths are omitted.
They're saying that 1,000,000 is the number for mosquitos, not because they kill people but their a carrier of disease.
What they are asking is do we consider other animals in the same capacity, such as, does the number beside humans include human transmittable diseases (HIV for example).
I am actually surprised cows (or cattle) are not on this list. Pretty sure they kill more people than sharks - even in Australia. (Mind you, the bovines also have more opportunity than sharks.)
I googled some but I can't find good information on freshwater snails? Some of the results reference cone snails, but those seem to be marine. How do snails kill people?
Pathogens aren't animals, so the mosquito is the one counted.
They don't count humans the same as other animals, instead, they count homicide/war (intentional killing), and you can just consider it a point of reference. Are you going to count accidents? Suicide? Anything that can be traced to human decisions? Anything that can be traced to human biology?
Any way you count humans, it just isn't going to be equivalent.
In the chart, the humans vs. mosquitos are not fairly comparable.
First - if you're going to say 'mosquitos kill humans because they transmit disease' and then include humans for a completely different reason (i.e. homicide) makes for an odd comparison.
For example, what if human transmission of the communicable disease results in some massive amount of death, which could very well be the case?
Second - mosquitoes are carrying a lot of otherwise benign things, which most people recover fine from. Possibly things like the flu. Well some people die from the flu, but very rarely. So I'm not sure if the fact it was communicated by a mosquito or something else makes sense.
Maybe inanimate objects, like the door handle to your public building, contribute more to basic pathogen spread, like the flu, in which case again, that would put things in context.
It's a tricky thing to compare lions attacking people to mosquitos that happen to spread in some cases, some minor thing that in may have rare deadly consequences.
Well I said elsewhere that they should probably skip the humans since it is so different, but I got pretty well downvoted.
Malaria is almost exclusively spread by mosquitos, so there is a certain logic to saying "mosquitos kill a lot of people." But you are right that most times you are bitten by a mosquito, it is nothing but a minor annoyance. It's a bit different from a lion.
Some people include deer in such charts, because people die by crashing their cars into deer. But that is pretty different too.
I grew up in Manitoba so have a very healthy hatred of mosquitoes - 50 of them once followed me into a car during the <1s window of me opening & closing the door (I know because I killed them all before driving) - but anyone leaning toward the idea we should exterminate mosquitoes is incredibly reckless. Ecological systems don't shift slowly, they collapse all at once. Their continued existence is predicated on feedback loops of mind-boggling complexity. To put it another way: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1120044775024013312
The issue is very well studied - Mosquitoes are an invading species in most areas; Only a few subspecies are harmful to humans, and they'll be replaced by similar mosquitoes that aren't.
Besides, there's a very wide gap between what the West is and was willing to do when an infectious disease happens.
When Malaria hit the West, we drained entire swamps (and their ecosystems) without a second though. When corona hits, we justifiably lockdown entire countries. When Malaria hits poor people, it's think about the Mosquitoes. I can't help but think there's a very ugly thing behind this double-standard.
There is a lot of hidden racism and colonialism in a lot of environmentalism.
Basically, the West developed and rid itself of a lot of disease and predators. But if developing countries try to do this, all sorts of “environmental” objections are raised.
I have even heard people say that mosquito borne illnesses are good because they keep people in poor nations from expanding into “pristine” forests.
Basically, if there were 100’s of thousands of children dying in the West from malaria, we would do anything to get rid of the problem(and we did). But when it is other people’s children dying, it becomes “think of the mosquitos.”
I don't disagree with you at all, I am just not sure how these concepts are related. Xenophobia?
You're absolutely right that western nations developed by radically altering environments. There's a certain sort of hypocrisy with environmentalists lobbying developing nations. I remember an elementary school trip about DDT and how it affected local peregrine falcon populations.
Not to mention the proposed actions aren't drastically altering the landscape and draining swamps, it's stuff like introducing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild that cause the species to become infertile and die off. Draining wetlands and destroying forests is of course many times more impactful then removing a single species.
Nature doesn't care about how something looks politically. Those decisions were bad and aren't vindicated because nothing went wrong (there are other cases where things went very very wrong, as another commenter mentions with DDT). In a nonlinear world you can never know whether you were right or just lucky.
Make no mistake, the West would do DDT all over again if that was the price for getting rid of Malaria. But a very targeted intervention is off limits due to 'well, we don't know, something might go wrong'.
Nature doesn't care if humans all die. Nature doesn't 'care' at all. Humanity does. And this looks very ugly and very hypocritical.
"The West" is doing DDT all over again. This time it's neonicotinoids, and just like with DDT, they're being pushed by ag conglomerates as a way to increase profits, with a side of "cigarettes give you healthy skin!" style propaganda to make them look innocent.
Last time, we "merely" almost wiped out a whole class of apex predators and caused a collection of trophic cascades. This time, with a menu of unintended consequences only the most obvious of which is the "colony collapse disorder" that's been imperiling pollinators worldwide, we might just end up managing to break modern agriculture entirely and cause famines worldwide, too.
So, yeah, "targeted interventions" merit extreme skepticism, because we as a species suck at them. If you want to look at that through a lens of anti-Westernism, you're welcome.
There's already a "colony collapse disorder", and nobody does anything. But when it comes to the Third World, suddenly we have to do nothing because something might happen (nobody even has a mechanism. We're supposed to sacrifice millions for delusions). This is unacceptable. Fortunately, there are enough good people in the world to ignore the callous.
The point you're ignoring in your haste to indict everyone you don't like - due to what I suspect to be your complete ignorance of, or at least disinterest in, the millions of dollars annually spent on research aimed at eradicating malaria worldwide by the very same "West" for which you cannot find enough opprobrium - is that we can't know what consequences will come of these kinds of broad, blunt methods.
Nobody expected DDT to drive large birds of prey nearly to extinction. Nobody expected neonicotinoids to concentrate in ecosystems and have a very similar effect on the insects we depend on to pollinate our food crops. It's not about predicting that terrible things will happen. It's that we aren't able to make sure terrible things won't. Neonicotinoids already have us at non-negligible risk of worldwide famine through agricultural collapse as a result of consequences we were too stupid and too hubristic to predict. How many millions do you think that will kill if it happens?
Because that's the kind of risk you're proposing - and, just as with that famine, it's a risk that will hit worst on the most vulnerable, least privileged people in the world. You know? The same ones in whose supposed defense you're making such a performative display of contempt?
I'm not indicting the entire West. I'm indicting certain people in the West that post silly almost conspiracy style stuff against obvious solutions to a deadly disease. There's an obvious balance here, and it's not on the 'we don't know how but something might happen' side. How about we all stop posting on HN? After all, posting might change magnetic fields which might change a butterfly's path which could cause a deadly hurricane?
P.S. We knew even at the time DDT was poisonous to life, and that draining swamps kills ecosystems. What changed wasn't so much our knowledge, but the situation (the West had gotten rid of many deadly diseases by that time, mosquitoes had started to develop resistance).
I find your appeal to hyperbole pretty distasteful. Please be civil and argue from the facts of the situation. There's a huge chasm of difference between what GP is saying and the words you're putting in their mouth.
The current situation is that many people needlessly die. The current approaches don't work well enough. Various radical approaches to fixing that have been investigated and tested to a significant degree. Now given the cost, testing and various answers to the objections, there comes the time the objections have to put a bit more meat and go beyond people have screwed up before, and something might happen.
I think the risk equation being questioned is different. Today, right now, with a better understanding of the risks for DDT, would it be better to have a campaign to eradicate malaria in sub-saharan Africa with tools like DDT? There would be ecological damage, both anticipatable and unknown. And that would have second and third-order detrimental impacts. But we'd also have a huge gain. Would it be worth it? Right now it is hard to have that kind of discussion.
Another related example: is it better to have the consequences of polluted cities powered with unclean coal, than to have a less developed country with fewer resources to spend on things like healthcare. Which on net is better? I certainly don't know, but the tradeoffs are real.
A series of extraordinary claims, for which you don't care to provide any support whatsoever. Okay.
I did, with a little effort, find a single source [1] for your "DDT didn't harm birds" claim. Of course, he's [2] also a climate denier, a conspiracy theorist, and a lobbyist for companies whose financial interests are coincidentally in total alignment with his "scientific" advocacy. But hey, if that's the company you want to keep, don't let me dissuade you.
Zubrin's fine, if excessively Golden Age of Science Fiction for my taste, when he talks about Mars. Earth, not so much. But, again, if you want to keep company with someone who's super excited about anthropogenic climate change, likens mosquitoes to Nazi V-2s, and alludes with crafty dissimulation to the conspiracy theory around environmentalism that forms the backbone of such sober documentaries as "Kingsman: The Secret Service" (2014), go for it.
You can attack the messenger all day, without addressing any of the actual science. Just because you dislike the facts doesn't change that they remain facts.
Silent Spring was a work of fiction, but it killed millions of children in the developing world, and continues to do so to this day. Fortunately at least some have seen the light and relaxed the ban on DDT.
Malaria used to be endemic in the USA as far north as New York. The USA "did DDT" specifically to eliminate malaria [1]. And it worked, the stuff is so nasty and persistent it completely wiped out the disease reservoir in the mosquito population. Was it worth the price? I'm an Audubon supporter and bird watcher, but I value human lives more highly.
Well, other western countries did use DDT heavily, e.g. Italy[0]. Besides, it's not like the means used in the 1930s didn't have a significant ecological effect...
I'll note that the modern suggestions to eradicate Malaria are more nuanced and at least try to only affect the parasite/host. e.g. releasing sterile males, immunizing the mosquitoes against the parasite[1], ATSBs, a GM fungus to poison mosquitoes, making human blood deadly to the parasite[2], etc.
IMHO (I'm far from an expert), the most promising seems to be releasing sterile males followed by some of the other approaches to deal the death blow to the parasite (though if the mosquito goes I won't be bothered).
Destroying every member of a specific species is ridiculous. In the next couple decades we'll solve the majority of the illnesses that these things cause and we can roll out the cures around the world without the permanent damage to these ecosystems.
I also lived for a time as a child in Manitoba and my grandfather got live altering malaria, so I don't share any love for these insects but we're part of something bigger and just because the west drained entire swamps doesn't mean I support that or that it validates making a species extinct on purpose.
"In the next couple decades", oh, a couple million would die, until maybe we'll have something else (or not). You have no right to make that choice.
The only reason people are even thinking about it, is because it doesn't affect the West. That's callousness masquerading as environmentalism. %$#@! the ecosystem* . People are more important.
* Nevermind no one has even shown any way that anything aside from the target would be harmed. Or that we could reintroduce the species once the parasite is gone.
You read the part about it being a specific couple of species, right? So unless somebody comes up with a brilliant plan that targets specifically those species, and only in the parts of the world where they're not native, and nothing else, we're still risking the same kind of consequences as with DDT, or neonicotinoids. The kind we can't predict in advance are going to fuck us over.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the optimism inherent in a perspective on the world that says there's necessarily a technological solution to everything, and more than that, one that modern-day humans are certainly smart enough to find. I just wish it didn't so lend itself to hubris.
The sterile-insect technique does work, but it's not going to achieve the kind of eradication people in here are talking about. Wild-eyed ideas about mass pesticide application and CRISPR gene drives are more the sort of thing that actually concern me, or would if I thought anyone talking about them was anywhere near the required levers of power to actually make them happen. As it is, I just wish people had enough sense of history to understand the import, although I suppose in the age of alternative facts that's far more than can reasonably be expected.
Strile-insect achieves 90-95% (e.g.[1]). Sustained and combined with a bit from the other approaches (netting, drying some swamps, this article suggests a medicine to make infected biting mosquitoes die, etc.), we can at least repeat what happened in much of the West - the population was reduced so much the parasite went extinct, when the population bounced back it was 'clean' (in other places in the West these mosquito simply went extinct).
We're talking about a very very specific ecosystem, which is frankly not relevant to humans (we can do fine without swamps).
There's no balance between the concern we don't have for the many ecologically damaging things humans do for profit and the nagging when we think about intervening with a disease that killed millions.
That's a nice theory, and I hope it happens, but hope is never a course of action, especially when we're talking about total hypothetical with no basis in fact at all.
Maybe you didn't click the link, so I guess I'll ask you: how many humans would die if we did exterminate the mosquitoes? More or less than 700,000? Do you know? You have no way of knowing how ecological systems would react.
Several of the comments responding to him do address this and at least some of the people commenting do appear to know, or at least know more than Nassim Taleb appears to.
Besides, his statement isn't an argument, and present no facts or information.
> Imbecilic remark. Do you know how many humans would die if we eliminated mosquitos? Any idea?
petters also appears to be correct on what would happen if we had these issues in North America. Your own province kills mosquitos en masse and those ones aren't even carrying deadly disease they are just a nuisance.
Taleb's position in general is one of extreme conservatism when meddling with ecological systems (for example he is also against GMOs). The basis for this conservatism is his general concern with risk in a nonlinear world. He does indeed put forth an argument, which is: can you predict the effects of this? No, you cannot, and possible effects include ecological collapse.
Re: Manitoba, spraying to reduce mosquito populations in urban areas is a whole different ball game from extermination.
I think disease-carrying species live together with non-disease-carrying species, which, if correct, would mean an ecological impact of effectively zero.
We humans have a long, long "tradition" of exterminating species and we know it will not affect things that really matter to us, like agriculture and water. The number of human deaths will be effectively zero.
Ecosystems adapt. The things eating mosquitoes would find something else to eat, or maybe not. Some species will grow their population, some will reduce. Some species will evolve a bit differently.
The idea that everything will collapse if we eradicate mosquitoes or pandas is just absurd (I have nothing against pandas by the way; I'm just observing that them disappearing did not collapse everything).
Citation needed. Mosquito extermination and habit destruction has been going on in USA for 60 years at least. It is THE primary method of malaria and dengue fever prevention around the world and is supported by every public health body on earth.
I am very much in favour. Well, not all mosquitoes, just those carrying infectious diseases. Ok, maybe not even wiping. We can keep some specimen in labs/zoos, and once the parasites/diseases has been wiped out by killing the hosts, we can release them again.
Humanity wipes out species by the dozens each year for no reason and people shrug, but for some reason many people don't want to target the few subspecies that are actually extremely harmful to humans.
Yes, I am in favor of exterminating every last mosquito. I’d rather deal with any results than the mosquitos themselves. Also I had a long conversation with a specialist in a company working on this and they convinced me that it wouldn’t actually be a big problem like some say.
I think the main reason people don't like camping or nature is because of mosquitos and biting ants. This dislike of outdoors converts directly to a lack of environmentalism. I don't know the conversion rate, so who knows how much more we'd care for nature minus mosquitos, but if we're destroying the planet either way, we should at least enjoy some part of life without these parasites.
The environment adapted just fine to the loss of these species.
The 1000s of other species made extinct recently... Oops!
...But again, the natural ecosystem didn't irrecoverably collapse.
After eliminating so many much more valuable or interesting species (IMO), I certainly don't want to stop right when we're getting to ticks and mosquitoes.
> it wouldn’t actually be a big problem like some say
Well this is the law of unintended consequences in action. Many people don't think it will have any negative effect but we don't know. Nature is extraordinarily complex and disrupting it in such a huge way almost always carries knock-on impact.
Saying we are too stupid to ever know anything is a pretty anti-scientific attitude. Maybe global warming is gonna make the world so much better, after all, we don't really know anything. It's impossible to actually live your life if you just throw your hands up and say "we don't know".
What we do know is that mosquitos have killed more humans than probably anything else ever. Shouldn't that be impetus enough to actually do something about it? Of course, the problem is made worse by the fact that the people who are advocating against doing anything aren't the people that mosquitos are killing. If you knew a lot of people who had died from Malaria, you might be singing a different tune.
Yes, and? It's not going to change the orbits of planets. Ecosystems will have to adapt to mosquitoes disappearing, like they did when countless other species disappeared.
> Also I had a long conversation with a specialist in a company working on this and they convinced me that it wouldn’t actually be a big problem like some say.
and a specialist working for an oil company convinced me that climate change happens all the time. he wasn't technically wrong, except that he wasn't around to enjoy those other times to attest that it would be "no big deal".
Isn’t that plan only to eliminate the specific species responsible for disease carrying? There are many mosquitos, the mosquito they’re targeting is just one.
That's true. But, by what plausible mechanism could this project switch from killing one species of mosquito to killing all of them?
There's no way it would happen via natural selection. The mosquito is engineered to die. The project has to keep releasing new genetically engineered mosquitos to mate with females.
I totally get the idea that removing all mosquitos would likely lead to spiralling ecosystem collapse, and it's possible that even killing this one species could do so.
But, are you arguing that trying to kill this one species could kill all mosquito species? I just don't see how that's possible with this mechanism.
One idea: killing one specious could cause some kind of
"trophic cascade" style impact. Such as, imagine that current preditor (B) of the targeted species (A) adapts to target an alternate species (C) and is a more efficient predator wiping them out. But then usual preditor of (C) species (D) has now lost is food source and dies off, as do species that depend upon it, maybe in indirect ways, like its excrement is needed to fertilize certain plant species and then other animals dependant upon that plant are impacted and so on and so on.
Note: I think these types of scenarios are unlikely and am in favor of the eradication programs (though I do think we should have smaller-scale trials not just to validate efficacy but also to understand unintended impacts). But we have observed these types of impacts. It isn't just a crazy idea. But nature also seems to me to quite adaptable.
I think that’s plausible, but you seem to have missed the point.
OP asked whether anyone was considering killing all mosquitos? Myself and others replied no, just this one species.
It’s indeed possible that there would be local ill effects, possibly even on other mosquitos. But I don’t see how it would affect mosquitos outside Aedes Aegypti’s habitat.
Also, the species is invasive outside of Africa. This increases the odds it could be safely eliminated in those areas.
I still agree there’s the possibility of great impacts. But I don’t think it could affect “all mosquitos”.
Malaria and dengue are only carried by certain mosquito species. Suggestions to eliminate mosquitos through gene therapy almost always concern those specific species, not the relatively harmless (yet very annoying) mosquitos of the global north.
One of my classmates came back from Africa to Europe this March without any symptoms. 10 days later she got high fever, dizziness, and unfortunately she could not even recognise her family. Everyone thought its COVID, and doctors recommended her to stay home to not spread the "virus". Unfortunately when she got the the hospital, the diagnostics was too late to and she died in malaria 1,5 days later.
Please beware of this infection and get the medication even if it has strong side effects.
I had a friend who was attending Stanford. He did a class trip to Africa, then back to the US. He also started to feel ill (but not too bad), so decided to fly home for winter break. He died of malaria on the flight to London. He was only 32 years old.
"class trip to Africa"- Its strange they didn't require him to get a shot before going to a country in Africa that is a Malaria risk. I know a lot UCLA and Michigan students who did exchange programs to African countries and got shots before leaving.
Malaria prophylaxis is pretty rough in and of itself, and it's not really recommended unless you're going to be in high-risk areas (source, tried to get it myself when going into Mozambique from South Africa, was told there that unless I was planning to stay "in the bush" for a few weeks, it was a bad idea)
South African here. Fact is most of our country is malaria free, the cities etc especially so. It’s only in the hottest, most humid part of the Bush that you will get the mosquitos, and then generally in summer.
When I travelled to Kenya last year my wife and I took malaria medication, we would do the same if going to a malaria area in SA in summer.
Sorry to hear. I wonder if this sort of thing is due to people not using travel agencies anymore? Before I started buying my own tickets I would go to the travel agency (in NZ) and depending on where I flew they always had a list of recommendation vaccines and such that I should take before going.
I don't know if travel agencies act similar outside of NZ.
Makes you wonder how many people have actually died so far this way. Being told to stay home and not spread covid, meanwhile something else is actually terribly wrong.
There was an Oncologist who was talking about how the number of women coming in for regular exams was non-existent for two months. A few months is enough time for breast cancer to go from stage 1 to stage 2, and for 5 year survival rates to drop by a third[0].
There are going to be a ton of secondary effects due to prematurely closing or clearing out hospitals and clinics, and many people have already died from completely preventable illnesses, with some clinics telling people to not come in when they should have.
With screenings, you have to be really careful about selection bias. Basically, screening will catch a larger proportion of slow growing cancer. Also with respect to staging, the slower growing a cancer, the earlier the stage you will catch it at.
My guess would be that if you have a cancer that is rapidly going from stage 1 to stage 2, you would already have a worse outcome and the 2 months screening hiatus is not going to be that big a difference maker.
EDIT:
In case people ask about clinical breast exams and self breast exams, here are the American Cancer Society guidelines:
"Research has not shown a clear benefit of regular physical breast exams done by either a health professional (clinical breast exams) or by women themselves (breast self-exams)."
So the only guidelines with evidence backing them up call for 2 year screenings. Within that framework, a 2 month delays are not going to be very clinically significant.
I don't understand where you'd get that implication.
Some presumably fairly predictable fraction would have an exam scheduled during the beginning of the epidemic, and a certain fraction of them would have undiagnosed cancer. It seems reasonable to assume significant negative consequences for those people.
Presumably some women would have had an exam in February but developed enough cancer to be visible in March, so delaying a couple of months had a huge positive impact on their outcome. How can we measure the net result of all these variables?
Think about it this way: you run a clinic that detects 100 cases of early stage breast cancer a month. So you detect a total of 1200 per year, right? Now imagine you close for three months. What happens? Well, 300 of these cases do not get detected during that period. Could they get detected later after you reopen? Sure but by its nature it means that they may not be early stage anymore. Also, some percentage of the women would not reschedule an appointment right away since when the clinic reopens it will be overdue by three months worth of appointments so they might wait much longer to be seen vs the regular schedule, exacerbating the problem.
You are correct that on an individual level it is a game of chance: if you are going to develop breast cancer it’s a bad thing but if by chance you develop it in the right window of time right before your annual exam, your outcome is likely to be better. But from the point of view of screening a large population stopping testing for a period of time is bad.
Think about it in terms of COVID: what would happen if all testing was shut down for a month? No, not everyone who gets COVID would get it in that month but the people who do will absolutely not get tested, right?
No argument here, but you've changed from "percent women who develop early stage breast cancer per month * number of months closed per year" (which I responded to) to "percent early stage breast cancer cases caught per month * number of months closed per year", which sounds more accurate.
No. It varies by age or location but it'd be once a year at max - unless perhaps you had already had it or for some other reason were extraordinarily high risk.
Exams performed by someone else? About once a year.
A self-exam once a month is one of those "good hygiene" things, though, and might be a decent idea to promote right now while people are getting cagey.
According to this New York Times article from the beginning of May, excess deaths in the United States outpaced official Coronavirus reporting by 33%. This obviously varies significantly by country. Certainly many more people are dying at home than previous years.
My understanding is that excess deaths statistic would also COVID deaths. You'd need to subtract COVID deaths from excess deaths. (and be certain that all COVID deaths are reported as such...)
Right - so ~25% of excess deaths in April in the United States were not directly caused by COVID-19, but were almost certainly indirectly caused by the virus, either via the 'medical care chilling effect' mentioned above, or through misattribution, or through other mechanisms like the increase in suicide.
This excess death mechanism has the potential to be very severe in very poor countries, where famine is likely to follow this plague. It's really quite sad.
The problem is that SARS-CoV-2 is so capable of infecting and disrupting a broad variety of cells that many multi-organ symptoms might manifest, so it wouldn't be a surprise if that's what's presumed to be the cause of an ailment at first considering its reproduction number.
It's terrifying. A friend of a friend of my wife just lost her baby. It was something that would have been easily seen in a routine screening, but because of COVID the OB/GYN wasn't having patients come to the office. It's heart breaking.
Are you saying she wouldn't have lost the baby if she had a routine screen or it would have given her the ability to deal with the issue a litle bit easier by planning a dnc?
I've been part of many miscarriages and doctors can tell you something is wrong but rarely can they fix anything before 12 weeks.
On top of that, it wouldn't be like the hospitals would be business as usual if the lockdown didn't occur. Models mostly showed they would have had their hands full with covid cases (and therefore still not handling normal cases and elective stuff). Additionally many people going to hospitals for whatever reason would likely end up exposed to COVID.
The ex-Covid death rate in New York is significantly above its baseline. Part of this may be undiagnosed covid deaths, but with less people out doing dangerous things, a lot of it is probably people avoiding hospitals.
ex-Covid rate is more likely due to undiagnosed covid. Especially when you look at the excess death rate compared to previous annual rates. (at least last time I looked at the graphs).
The excess death rate (ex covid) is relative to previous annual rates. I don't think you can disambiguate between "deaths due to undiagnosed covid" and "deaths due to untreated illness due to avoiding hospitals"
You're right. But if the excess mirrors the diagnosed rate (rise and fall) one might reasonably infer that it is driven by covid. Compared to deaths resulting from/driven by people staying away from hospitals which would depend on when lockdowns were announced, when behaviors changed, etc.
Although both mechanisms would bear some relation, it looked to me more like it was driven by spread of the infection rather than changes to behavior.
The point that you can't really separate them completely is well-taken though.
EDIT: I'm clearly all over the place with terminology. Something along the lines of looking at the (all_cause_mortality - covid_deaths - historic_avg) residual and seeing how closely it mirrors say alpha*covid_deaths where alpha is some constant. If it mirrored it well (or for example preceded it and the lock downs in the manner that would be expected of infection) one might infer that those deaths were probably covid. If on the other hand they were strictly related to the time the news broke and lock downs and changes to hospital admittance rates, then it might be better explained as resulting from lockdown issues.
> But if the excess mirrors the diagnosed rate (rise and fall) one might reasonably infer that it is driven by covid. Compared to deaths resulting from/driven by people staying away from hospitals which would depend on when lockdowns were announced, when behaviors changed, etc.
Yea absolutely. I haven't seen yet seen any analysis that does this, but I'm sure one will come along soon
Another way we can control mosquitoes is by making sure the native bird populations are healthy. Where I live tree and bank swallows eat tons and tons of mosquitoes and other bugs every year which helps control the population. I wouldn't recommend releasing these birds elsewhere because they may not have any natural predators but surely where there are tons of mosquitoes there are also predators of mosquitoes as well.
Otherwise this reminds me of well-meaning efforts to control erosion by planting Kudzu or Himalayan Blackberry everywhere. Ultimately they just become an invasive species. And I could also see eradicating mosquitoes as removing a food species for many other animals. This is a really bad idea.
Is this true? I recall looking into this and finding that swallows, bats, and other "mosquito predators" don't put a dent in mosquito populations (mosquitoes are numerous and only account for a negligible percentage of these predators' diets).
The right question is "How significant is this?" because of course predators have an effect on prey population dynamics, but the question is what effect and how big.
>We conclude that predators and parasites have a limited but
significant effect on overall mosquito populations, and their role should be considered when implementing habitat
management, mosquito control and when modeling mosquito population dynamics.
That’s great news if it is significant. Everything I had previously read indicated that their impact was negligible. I hate mosquitos, so I hope your link is correct.
Thinking of ways to reduce mosquitos populations are understandable, and many organisations are working on them, but this proposition to completely eradicate them, mainly with certain technologies, is borderline insanity.
The problems eradication solves are obvious and important to solve.
The problems eradication might cause are less obvious and are potentially disastrous.
There are thousands of species of mosquito, dozens of which transmit malaria, and only a handful which do it really well.
Many of the mosquitos are invasive species anyway. The point being, there are many many of species which would fill up the ecological niche left if we extincted a few.
Im surprised with how much certainty you make such a claim.
Next to that it's not only the side effect of extinction of one species, but also the unforeseen side effects of the technologies used to accomplish this (extreme) extinction.
The whole point of technologists is that they really have to much faith that we both understand these complex ecosystems and complex technologies we just started using.
To try to put a technology on grand scale that you don't fully understand and can't control once in the wild is really stupid.
What's to say something strange doesn't happen with these "modified mosquitoes" and we somehow engineer a super mosquitos or kill off 4 other species accidentally.
I really want to believe that doing this would be something that humans should explore, but I think the chance of something going wrong is fairly high. Considering our rather terrible track record with stuff like this (weapons, pesticides, etc).
It often takes decades to truly see how it works, so while we may end the mosquitos problem we may make ourselves a worse one.
The whole superhero mosquito thing is pretty solidly unlikely. For starters these things are tested in closed environments (already has been done many times). The worst you might expect is it not working at all.
Also, the mosquito lifecycle is as little as a week or two from egg to egg. The process would be rather fast.
According to the book "The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator" by Timothy C. Winegard, the mosquito has killed an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion people that have ever lived. (Not sure how those numbers were determined.)
This book is in a genre I like (microhistories) but I found it pretty dull reading. It's basically a very superficial history of "the world" (mainly Western Europe) that posits malaria to be the cause of pretty much every world event. I'm sure there's some truth to this, but the plodding military metaphors and oversimplifications really started to wear on me.
Evolution doesn’t care about longevity or quality of life: it’s all about passing genes on. If some kind of mosquito resistance didn’t lead to increasing the number of children you have there’s not going to be much selection pressure for it.
Possibly but it’s a complicated trade off: first, there’s the question of how much advantage it could confer – if young people get through a disease and the deaths are mostly old people who are past reproductive age, there might not be enough advantage (especially since humans are social - a 10 year old losing a parent is a tragedy but probably not fatal if you live with older siblings, relatives, or a tribe). Depending on what people are dying of and when, this might not be enough to select for.
The second big factor is what it would need to develop. This isn’t a directed process - something needs to confer a benefit of some sort early to be selected for, not just after hundreds of generations. If you’re talking about a major change like completely changing mammalian skin, that sounds very complicated compared to other things (such as improved immune function for the specific disease killing people), and there’s an arms race if all you’re doing is selecting for mosquitoes with better bites which might not be winnable.
Finally, there’s the question of downsides: do the mutations producing this leave you more vulnerable to other conditions, less likely to attract mates, etc. If that tough skin costs more to grow, you’re paying the cost upfront even if you’re living somewhere without a huge mosquito population, so it might be maladaptive for too much of the total population to maintain.
The downsides discussion is particularly relevant in the case of sickle cell anemia, which is believed to be a side effect of an evolved malaria resistance – beneficial if you live in an area where it’s common but a net loss if you do not:
Insects, however, reproduce so much that without population control, the ecosystem would be in imbalance very quickly, and they can't be educated to have less children. Insects were "designed" into the system such that a large number of them are expected to die.
I wouldn't be surprised if birds and spiders kill far more insects than people.
I appreciate that type of thinking. I also think that we desire so much to modify or eradicate other species, but we haven't thought about our own species' overpopulation, which is taxing the planet dearly. Not saying people should die, but that in the same breath we have to think about sustainability from that angle too. We're producing too many new humans, and it's lowering the quality of life for both our species and others...
I think it would take a lot of mosquitoes to take down a human.
> True, this tiny insect does not do the job on its own. What makes it so dangerous is its capacity to transmit viruses or other parasites that cause devastating diseases.
If you catch Covid-19 from a kiss, we don’t say the other person killed you. We firmly blame the disease not the person who transmits it. “Well your honor, Sally didn’t do it on her own, it was her capacity to transmit viruses or other parasites. But mostly her.”
These all seem communicable, but we don’t blame humans:
“Lower respiratory infections remained the most deadly communicable disease, causing 3.0 million deaths worldwide in 2016. The death rate from diarrhoeal diseases decreased by almost 1 million between 2000 and 2016, but still caused 1.4 million deaths in 2016. Similarly, the number of tuberculosis deaths decreased during the same period, but is still among the top 10 causes with a death toll of 1.3 million. HIV/AIDS is no longer among the world’s top 10 causes of death, having killed 1.0 million people in 2016 compared with 1.5 million in 2000.”
Mosquitos transmit and incubate malaria. You don't get malaria from hanging out with a person with it, you get it from getting bit by a mosquito that has previously bitten a person with malaria. [0] Given that the two are intrinsically related, it makes little difference when having a shallow discussion to make the distinction.
>"But the deadliest animal in the world, in terms of how many people it kills every year, is by far the mosquito. As nicely illustrated in an infographic by gatesnotes, mosquitoes kill at least 725,000 persons every year"
And yet, we never seem to hear this fact on the News...
Yet we do get stories of the form "X killed Y people", where X is some person/group/phenomenon, and Y < 725,000...
And usually, Y is not just less, but several orders of magnitude less -- than 725,000...
Also... if you happen to leave a window open at night (accidentally, not intentionally, I might add!), and a mosquito should happen to get in -- does that make you an "accessory to murder" ?
> And yet, we never seem to hear this fact on the News...
Not sure where you get your news but I’ve heard this mentioned regularly on NPR in coverage about the impacts of climate change, outbreaks, programs testing things like the genetically-engineered sterile mosquito releases, and local programs which are trying to reduce it even if it’s not a high cause of death in the United States. Remember when Zika got heavy coverage?
"And yet, we never seem to hear this fact on the News..."
Most likely because A. it disproportionally impacts poorer people in far-off countries and B. It's harder to sell as an enemy/scapegoat compared to other humans/groups/foods/illnesses
One time, while hiking to go bass fishing in the high Uintas, I got attacked by a swarm of mosquitos so insane that they were trying to bite me through my shirt, through my shorts, my face was covered and one of the little bastards managed on land on my cornea. Nightmarish.
Or poverty. Basic healthcare, mosquito nets and dealing with standing water would probably eliminate the majority of these deaths without killing a single mosquito.
It is uneasy to read this number and I don't get the full picture here.
1. What is the distribution of this number across geographical regions? Is it uniformly spread across all regions? Are some regions outliers?
2. The distribution of this number over time of the year in every geographic region is perhaps an interesting thing to look at for short-term solutions.
Yes, but mosquitos kill that many every single year. Look at the reaction to COVID-19 compared to the amount of effort going into eliminating mosquito-borne disease. There's certainly some, but it's far from the mobilization we see when a calamity on this scale hits rich countries.
Maybe that's cause-and-effect turned around? We stifled our economy and mobilize a million researchers, because we can afford to and have the will. It'll cost us in the end.
What do folks in malaria country do? Scavenge their childrens' mosquito nets to catch fish etc. Reject modern medicine and go to the local quack. Foul their water supplies and poach their endangered species.
I know, we can have all the morals we can afford. But some large-scale coordinated actions require a populace that is educated and willing.
It's because SARS-CoV-2 is new, and new things scare us more than things we know. This entire thing has been an exercises in how people fail to properly evaluate risk ... on a global scale .. leading to economic devastation.
The main difference is covid hit home. People dont really care when it happens in other countries - how many blinked as people were dying in china? Almost no one cared.
"The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator" by Timothy Winegard is an excellent read on the topic of the Mosquito. I'm paraphrasing, but I think he mentions that, of all the humans that have ever lived, the mosquito accounts for half of their deaths.
IIRC Weren’t they genetically modified mosquitoes to stop their spread? I guess I’m curious at what point would the Chi turn and we would gain control over the mosquito population?
If we really want to be accurate, why not talk about the parasites actually to blame, which the mosquitoes incidentally transmit? I carry no brief for the little flying bloodsuckers, but I also don't want to find out what happens to ecosystems when the many animals that prey on mosquitoes and their larvae are suddenly deprived of them.
Sorry. When I cut/paste the subtitle of the article on submission, I thought I grabbed the entire subtext. Not sure how that happened, but I've edited the title.
I don't know where that was mentioned in the article, so I think we're going off topic, but isn't the use of cures weighed against their efficacy and danger? No one would suggest chemotherapy for a cold.
Hydroxycholorquine has proven to be effective against Malaria, which is terrible and can be deadly, but proven ineffective and in fact can make worse COVID, so it's not recommended to be used there. Makes sense to me.
It's been shown to have no benefit when someone is near-dead from COVID. Don't 80% of people on ventilators die anyway? So ventilators have no benefit. From what I have been reading, the drug does have benefit when used as a prophylactic, in combination with zinc. Of course we now have politicized medicine due to the fact Trump is taking it, and whatever Trump does must be de-facto bad. Now we have countries banning it's use, because of the WHO, who also said masks are useless.
Given that the entire world is studying these drugs, and many nations have now suspended their research, I don't think you can chalk it up to a single person, unless you're assuming the entire world is defining their own medical and research policies based upon Twitter outrage.
The WHO is not advising stopping all HCQ trials but has only dropped HCQ from the Solidarity Trial, and that many prophylaxis trials using HCQ are ongoing or about to start.
Malarone is also a malaria preventative, and I personally had a psychotic break while taking it, it took 8 men to hold me down and strap me a bed for two days until I came to.
The antimalarial prophylaxis which is infamous for mental-health disturbances is lariam (mefloquine). Are you sure you weren't taking that instead? When malarone appeared on the market, one of its big selling points was that it does not have the drawbacks of lariam (or doxycycline).
You know, I am not 100% sure, the time beforehand is pretty foggy and they both have an m name it makes me question the memory... it was many years ago.
If you don't mind, could you say a bit more about the psychotic break? The closest thing from my own experience is being told that I thrashed around a lot while coming out of post-surgery anesthesia, but I have no memory of it.
I remember having a sundowner, talking with my family and slowly getting more and more irritated about some minor conversational bit someone said.
I clearly remember starting to get louder and more aggressive and then I blacked out. I woke up in a pool of my own sweat several days later wondering what had happened.
People talked to me about what happened I piece together bits and pieces floating around in a red haze and having a human pile on top of me.
In retrospect the weirdest part was how readily they accepted I was sane again.
General anesthesia often has this effect on both sides, because muscle tone is lost late in induction and regained early in recovery. If you've been surprised to find yourself wrapped snugly in a sheet just before being put under, this is why.
It's not related to the sort of mental effects of antimalarials mentioned in GP's comment.
Chemotherapy has been used as a cancer treatment for decades as well. There is zero doubt that chemo is extremely harmful to the body even as it destroys cancer cells. Sometimes you take one thing that's unsafe because something else is more unsafe. That doesn't make the thing safe.
"Common side effects may include vomiting, headache, changes in vision, and muscle weakness. Severe side effects may include allergic reactions, vision problems, and heart problems."
Sure, these side effects may be uncommon, but they're a hell of a lot more common than they are if you don't take hydroxychloroquine.
Incidentally, it's an open secret that a lot of the popular NSAIDs wouldn't be OTC if they were discovered today. Specifically because NSAIDs aren't just "safe", over the counter dosages are quite low--low enough that they're ineffective in many cases, which is why the same NSAIDs are prescribed at orders of magnitude higher doses.
There's historical precedent for "safe" drugs being problematic during a pandemic: aspirin poisoning was a significant cause of death during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
Yes, so what you said didn't contradict anything I said. Hydroxycloroquine is safer than acetaminophen which is available openly at doses that can destroy the liver.
Here is what the CDC says about hydroxychloroquine. To call it "unsafe" is ridiculous and spreading misinformation.
Hydroxychloroquine is a relatively well tolerated medicine. The most common adverse reactions reported are stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and headache. These side effects can often be lessened by taking hydroxychloroquine with food.Hydroxychloroquine may also cause itching in some people.
All medicines may have some side effects. Minor side effects such as nausea, occasional vomiting, or diarrhea usually do not require stopping the antimalarial drug. If you cannot tolerate your antimalarial drug, see your health care provider; other antimalarial drugs are available
> Yes, so what you said didn't contradict anything I said. Hydroxycloroquine is safer than acetaminophen which is available openly at doses that can destroy the liver.
My point is, that even if it's safer than acetaminophen (which is not in evidence) that's doesn't mean it's safe. Which is a direct contradiction to your glib, "Wrong."
The CDC says "Hydroxychloroquine is a relatively well tolerated medicine." So, unless you know something more than the CDC, it sounds safe to me. That would absolutely make what you're saying "wrong", and you're spreading misinformation.
> The Panel recommends against using high-dose chloroquine (600 mg twice daily for 10 days) for the treatment of COVID-19 (AI), because the high dose carries a higher risk of toxicities than the lower dose.
> The FDA warning that cautioned against the use of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 outside the setting of a hospital or clinical trial was added to this section.
Do they say this because it's a safe drug? No, they say it because it kills more people than it helps when used to treat covid-19.
Wrong. CDC itself says it's a well tolerated drug. Stop adding your own lies to something you have no understanding about except reading from the headlines.
It appears these people are motivated by politics and not science. There's no point in telling them what other countries such as India believe, because it doesn't fit with their world view that "everything Trump says is wrong". I'm not even a Trump supporter but the fact is that it is a safe drug, but they appear to not follow science but rather politics.
lol why do people keep associating this with COVID-19? Nowhere did I mention COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine is primarily an anti-malaria drug, which the article is about.
> lol why do people keep associating this with COVID-19?
Because:
1. The article doesn't mention hydroxychloroquine and
2. Hydroxychloroquine is being touted as a cure to Covid 19, a claim that has its basis in politics, not science. Part of the claim being made is exactly the (wrong) claim you were defending: that hydroxychloroquine is safe--as if safe/unsafe were a binary.
If you go from an article about malaria to an only tangentially-related topic of hydrochloroquine and basically parrot Trump's untrue claim that hydrochloroquine is perfectly safe, you shouldn't be surprised if people assume that you're agreeing with Trump's claim that hydrochloroquine should be used to treat Covid-19.
Understand that claims occur in a context. The CDC's claim that hydrochloroquine is well-tolerated is in the context of treating a very deadly disease (malaria) that it is proven to treat. Your claim that hydrochloroquine is safe occurs in the context of treating a much less deadly disease (Covid 19) which it may actively exacerbate. Maybe you intended your claim in the context of treating malaria with hydrochloroquine, but that wasn't the context you said it in.
It is safe. It is provably safe. Period. End of sentence. No qualifications. Many people take it daily for various diseases for long periods of time. Is it safe for everyone? No. No drug is safe for everyone. But for the majority it is safe. Go do the research, which you haven't based on what you're saying.
This has nothing to do about Trump, and I don't care what he says. I do care what the FDA and CDC have to say, and I have bothered to actually research this deeply.
You may not want to believe science, and you want to follow your political/religious beliefs that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug, so go ahead. Don't believe for one second that you're following science. There are other posts in this thread from people who have taken the drug daily, and there's research from other non-white countries (which you probably will discount). The FDA considers it safe. The CDC considers it safe. Canada considers it safe. India considers it safe. Every country safely prescribes its use for malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. The study that said it was unsafe has been heavily criticized. If you don't want to follow science, then that's fine, but at least realize that you aren't following it. Don't pretend that you are when really you're just following politics and your own beliefs.
In this absurd definition of "safe", then nothing is safe. Drinking too much water will kill you, hence, water is unsafe. Driving is unsafe. Living is unsafe, since you will die. But go ahead believing what you want to believe.
Are you going to cite any actual evidence for that bold claim? Here, like this:
>We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.
Evidence for what claim? That hydroxychloroquine is safer than Tylenol?
I don't know why you connected what I said with anything to do with COVID-19. I didn't say that it helped, in fact, I think it was bad science that lead to that belief. But the fact that hydroxychloroquine is safe is beyond argument.
This is from the CDC:
Hydroxychloroquine is a relatively well tolerated medicine. The most common adverse reactions reported are stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and headache. These side effects can often be lessened by taking hydroxychloroquine with food. Hydroxychloroquine may also cause itching in some people.
All medicines may have some side effects. Minor side effects such as nausea, occasional vomiting, or diarrhea usually do not require stopping the antimalarial drug. If you cannot tolerate your antimalarial drug, see your health care provider; other antimalarial drugs are available
I think replying with a sardonic “Wrong.” and then making an unsubstantiated claim made it pretty clear what the pretext of your comment was. But sure...I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Regardless, no it’s not “safe beyond argument”. Let’s try again.
FDA:
>”Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine:
- should be used for COVID-19 only when patients can be appropriately monitored in the hospital as required by the EUA or are enrolled in a clinical trial with appropriate screening and monitoring. FDA is reviewing the safety of their use when used outside of the setting of hospitalized patients for whom use was authorized.
have not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19.
are being studied in clinical trials for COVID-19, and FDA authorized their temporary use during the COVID-19 pandemic under limited circumstances through the EUA, and not through regular FDA approval.
- being used under the EUA when supplied from the Strategic National Stockpile, the national repository of critical medical supplies to be used during public health emergencies.
can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation
can cause dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia.
- pose risks that may increase when these medicines are combined with other medicines known to prolong the QT interval, including the antibiotic azithromycin, which is also being used in some COVID-19 patients without FDA approval for this condition.
- should be used with caution in Patients who also have other health issues such as heart and kidney disease, who are likely to be at increased risk of these heart problems when receiving these medicines.”
>“Be aware that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine can:
- cause QT prolongation
- increase the risk of QT prolongation in patients with renal insufficiency or failure
- increase insulin levels and insulin action causing increased risk of severe hypoglycemia
- cause hemolysis in patients with Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency
- interact with other medicines that cause QT prolongation even after discontinuing the medicines due to their long half-lives of approximately 30-60 days”
Your reference conflates hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to try to prove your point. Chloroquiine is a different drug with stronger side effects, which I explicitly mentioned.
How about finding information about hydroxychlorquine on its own? This is from the FDA itself:
I suggest you actually try to do some deeper research besides just reading politicized versions of information. First and foremost, educate yourself on the differences between hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, they are two different chemicals. Just like how "dihydrogen monoxide" and "hydrogen sulfate" are two different chemicals, even though they have the word "hydrogen" in them.
Ah, so the sources that don’t fit your narrative are “politicized”, yet others (from the same entity) are not? What a convenient pattern of thought.
I read the document you linked to, and it outlines the potential risks and side effects of the medication and clearly specified that it should be administered with the supervision of a doctor. This adds evidentiary weight against your original claim that it is “safer than acetaminophen” (which yes, is also dangerous if misused), and you still haven’t provided any evidence whatsoever for that claim. I’ll wait.
All drugs have risks and benefits. Some of those risks can be magnified in nonlinear ways based on many potential interactions, which is why people should rely on medical advice from their doctors, and should fully ignore opinions from ping_pong.
For some uses, the benefits outweigh the risks. Context matters. Is grapefruit juice safe? It depends. In combination with some medications, it can kill you.
You pretty much completely negated whatever point you had, so I'm not sure what your point is now. Every drug has positive and negative side effects. Just because a small percentage of people have adverse side effects doesn't mean that the drug is unsafe, otherwise ALL DRUGS are unsafe by this definition. So if your point is that all drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, are unsafe, then fine, you are correct by this absurd definition.
However, to more reasonable people, hydroxychloroquine is safe because the vast majority of people can take it daily for decades without any adverse effects. People with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis take it daily, with most having no adverse effects. It's provably more safe than a drug like Acetominophen. Are there people who suffer adverse effects by taking it? Yes. But it's a small minority of people. And if the only definition of "safe" is that no one ever gets adverse effects, then there is no such chemical that qualifies to be safe, including water. Water in large enough doses will kill people.
The reason why I'm saying it's politicized is because the very mention of the drug has become politicized. Look at your reaction and other responses. I never mentioned COVID-19, and you were the one to bring it up. The drug has been caught up in the nonsense with COVID-19 and Trump taking it, but that was never the point. I never mentioned that, all I did was talk about whether or not it's safe, which it is. People like you who know nothing about the drug start echoing talking points from the news because you think you're so much smarter than other people, and yet you don't even read basic information about the drug. If you did, you would speak more educatedly about the drug instead of parrot what you heard on Twitter.
If you don't believe what was written by the CDC and the FDA, then that's your right to believe whatever it is that you want. But it's not science, it's religion. You want to believe that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug even against science. Even the research paper that you linked to has been resoundly criticized with science and math. But I guess since you religiously believe what you want to believe, you'll stick with believing that the paper is correct instead of following the science.
Observational and case control studies in India showed there were "no major side effects" of taking the drug as a prophylactic, ICMR Director-General Balram Bhargava said.
Cases of nausea, vomiting and heart palpitations were noted, he added.
Last week, the ICMR—which is leading the government's response to the virus—expanded its advisory for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure.
The body said all healthcare workers in hospitals and some frontline personnel could now take the drug for up to several weeks under strict medical supervision.
"We recommended that for prophylaxis, it should be continued, because there is no harm. Benefit may be there," Bhargava told reporters.
Bhargava added that when the ICMR weighed the risks and benefits of the drug, it decided that "we should not deny it to our frontline workers and healthcare workers."
Cool, good to know (not being sarcastic). This is an example of public health / medical professionals making a rational risk vs. benefit decision and pursuing harm reduction (“for up to several weeks under medical supervision”). AKA, they are practicing medicine, and also collecting valuable experience/data on a potential use of the drug. All good.
700K per year. ok let's let the elephant out of the bag:
why haven't we been in lockdown every year until this deadly scourge has been exterminated?
and no, it's not that the current pandemic was more uncertain. even by january/february, it was clearly less contagious and deadly than the 1918 flu. we had good bounds on potential trajectory by early march, when many lockdowns were being implemented.
you know that the most effective preventative for mosquito bites are mosquito nets, like staying inside, with screens on your windows and doors, right?
even with mosquito nets that we've had for centuries, possibly millenia, we're still losing 700K+ per year, so the cheap solution (free, in many cases) isn't working.
covid is trending toward the same death rate. therefore, we should lock down against mosquitos to be consistent.
i get it, cognitive dissonance sucks, but "nonsensical ideologies" indulge in the panic and anxiety rather than fortifying your resolve against the hysteria. your fear is someone else's power.
And people who live in areas where malaria is common do use nets and screens as much as possible. Unlike many people in western countries though, they don't have the luxury of locking themselves down indefinitely. Nor do they have the same expectation that the measures would only need to be temporary.
> And people who live in areas where malaria is common do use nets and screens as much as possible.
Ehh, not exactly. I used to live in Africa, parts where there were tstsi flies and mosquitos. Despite being given nets by the Gates foundation, people rarely used them. Well, some used them as hair nets, others through them away because their pastors convinced them their purpose was to sterilize the African people, etc etc.
The lockdown isn't intended to protect the people staying inside, although that certainly helps; it's designed to protect everyone who they'd otherwise be infecting unknowingly.
In about 3 months. For a disease that was growing exponentially before action was taken and even now is only just stopped growing in countries where action was taken.
And no mosquito outbreak has caused entire hospital systems to collapse in various parts of the world.
Your reasoning is flawed. Mosquito bites don't silently and rapidly spread through human populations via close contact. If I get bit by a mosquito and walk into a crowded bar the patrons within are not at risk of becoming infected. Not true with COVID.
Where I live we're concurrently experiencing, besides COVID19, a dengue fever outbreak. Dengue fever is spread by mosquitoes -- specifically, Aedes Aegypti.
Dengue is way more serious than COVID19. Particularly worrisome, having had dengue makes subsequent reinfections more life-threatening, not less.
There are ways to eradicate the mosquito -- mainly getting rid of small clear water containers near/within your home, such as vases and empty plant pots -- but we still don't do it until it's too late and becomes a problem. A single neighbor who doesn't do this endangers the whole block. And the authorities don't give a fuck. It's infuriating, really.
So to rephrase your question, why don't we do something about it? It's way more actionable than COVID19 (though lockdowns don't work for the reasons others told you). So who knows?
> we still don't do it until it's too late and becomes a problem. A single neighbor who doesn't do this endangers the whole block. And the authorities don't give a fuck. It's infuriating, really.
You seem to be strangely unaware of the large amount of money which has been spent for decades on mosquito control by individuals and all levels of government. There are widespread control campaigns, active research into developing new weapons (e.g. traps which are effective against tiger mosquitoes), and community awareness to get more people involved with habitat control and using things like bed nets.
> You seem to be strangely unaware of the large amount of money which has been spent for decades on mosquito control by individuals and all levels of government.
Which government are you talking about? I don't live in the US and you linked to EPA and Yale. I can tell you my government is doing very little to combat dengue fever, and when they do, it's too little, too late.
> widespread control campaigns [...] community awareness
There's very little of that. And one careless neighbor effectively endangers the whole apartment block.
yeah, that's the kind of thing that's absolutely infuriating relative to the panic and paranoia we're seeing with this pandemic just because it's novel.
Without a lockdown, it’s still possible. Latest estimates are 0.5-1 percent fatality rate, which maps to 2-3 million people here in the US, and if everyone got ill in a short succession, because it is very contagious, the death toll would certainly be higher.
Recent birthday party, 20 people, every single one caught the disease.
The 0.5-1% fatality rate would be a LOT higher if all those people did fall sick at the same time.
Hospital systems would collapse because of the number of sick people. Doctors and nurses would be missing because they would almost all likely fall sick.
And people who would not die of COVID would die of other stuff because healthcare systems would have collapsed.
This is what happened in Italy. This is what was happening in NYC for a few days at its worst. This is what is about to happen in Brazil and possibly in India.
> Latest estimates are 0.5-1 percent fatality rate
I read just a couple of days ago that the IFR (infection fatality rate) is only ~0.25%-0.3%? Still ~four times higher than that of the flu, but not ten times greater.
yes, IFR was trending toward 0.2-0.3% even in march, and with time it's only become more likely that those are the bounds. flu averages around 0.1% IFR, so likely 2-3X as deadly.
The current CDC "best estimate" is ~0.4%, assuming an R0 of 2.5, with estimates of ~0.2% if the R0 is actual ~2 in the US and ~1% if the R0 is actually 3.
Pretty sure that 0.4% is "among people who develop symptoms" and 35% of infections are asymptomatic. So 0.4% of 65% of infections, or ~0.26% of infections.
it's not a single source, but certainly media editorialized that into the collective consciousness as an attention-capturing bonanza, and many politicians leapt onto the same opportunity to promote their power, agendas and careers. same for said "experts": a chance to be in the media, and if they were wrong, oh well, that's science.
Your pushback against the HN downvoter cowards, especially when you've questioned the status quo and planted a seed of dissent against the grain, is quite appreciated by this particular HN user.
Honestly, I find the dialogue here toxic and coarse, and I'm sure I'm a part of that, too. Ideally I'd just delete my account, and never come back... But HN won't allow me to delete my account, so, in spite, I'll keep coming back.
Years ago it wasn't like this, and I recall reading mostly hardcore tech nerdery on here.
Now... I don't even know. HN and Reddit are pretty well useless, and the only thing that keeps me around Reddit are automotive and industrial/machining subs. Seems strange that it was only 8 years ago.
Member when HN was overwhelmingly pro meritocracy? I member.
I really miss reading King Terry's diatribes in showdead. You'd probably be outright banned for that on here now.
I don't think people downvoted as much back then either.
The same thing happened to Russian IT hub, Habr.com. Today it's nothing but a propaganda outlet aimed at those who spin the cogs of this technocratic machine (and especially at the suggestible teens who will spin them in the future). The same thing over and over again all over the internet and society as a whole. No choice, no dissent, no free will. We know better. You get muted and ridiculed. Silently. Efficiently. Yes you can but you can't.
People today seem to be scared to death to think different (not as in apple).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... (2016)
Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.
It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.
This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.
Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.
It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.
> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.
> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.
Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.
> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws
I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.
Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.
I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.
Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally
While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.
Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.
At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"
We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.
Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.
There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].
[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding
[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?
It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...
I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).
Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.
You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
I was in an a little bit conflict zone recently, and people asked if I was worried and said I should be careful. They didn't know -- the local people living there -- that the traffic is 100 times more dangerous than the slightly ongoing conflict. They just look at the news and feel worried about whatever the newspapers write about, which is _not_ the traffic.
And maybe people would realize they're being manipulated by media and the "presidents" who own the media -- those presidents tend to get more votes, the more afraid people are for each other.
> collective psychological effect
Maybe peace?
And fewer traffic accidents, more subways and trains. Better mental care
> Approximately 475,000 people die every year at the hand of fellow man. In a world filled with conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism, this is unfortunately not that surprising. Deaths among humans are intentional and pre-calculated making them beyond tragic.
Traffic is not an attack.
Cows or the sugar plant depending on who you believe if we are counting anything. We attack them and we die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...
The pattern appears to be, very young child, or older adult, attacked by either a pitbull or pack of dogs.
That's not an accident.
The only way to dissuade the pit, after what was at least a couple of minutes of this and with the smaller dog being disemboweled, was that I stabbed the pit bull in the neck with my pocket knife.
Their physical power and stubbornness should not be taken for granted.
Both dogs survived the incident.
The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I did finally get its attention.
Stabbing the pit bull ended the attack within seconds. My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation.
Another bystander took the small dog and its owner to the pet hospital in her car where emergency surgery saved its life.
I'm not sure the eventual fate of the pit bull but I know that it was turned over to the custody of the local SPCA and the owner was given some type of citation.
No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts of those involved made the situation worse before it was made better. And based on the new facts, starting with the owner.
Just as with humans, there's a well understood hierarchy of severity of tools for handling situations such as that one, though only a small minority of dog owners know them. It's incredibly unfortunate that dog lives are more or less toys for humans to play with, otherwise this fight is likely to never have happened if it was a severe as you say before it turned into a five animal brawl.
Bottom line the three of you DID make it worse before it was made better. The punching and kicking won't help in all probability. It's simply not on the spectrum of effective tools. Killing is on the far end, so I'm not begrudging your actions, I'm begrudging the behavior before it: yelling (probably), kicking, and punching instead of forcing the bite, wheelbarrowing, and other environmental tools that may have been available. Y'know, the things that animal behaviorists have figured out, how to cause specific behaviors, like stopping a dog from biting another during a fight.
I'm not sure why I wrote this comment since apparently your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog. You managed to stop the fight without causing death, a huge win, but you wish otherwise. I sincerely hope your future is brighter than your past.
Nope, this was more like a 10 year old being savagely beaten by a 30 year old very strong, very violent, out of his mind MMA fighter who wanted to kill the 10 year old.
What you're saying makes sense for some breeds. The whole point was that pitbulls are more agressive and violent than other breeds.
My biggest issue from the start was the socialization of "three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release," which failed, predictably, and I didn't want anyone to think that that was a good thing to try in the first place.
I don't know what would have been, so to speak, appropriate and would have been effective. The one thing I knew to try was to do the wheelbarrow and that did nothing at leas in attitude of the pit bull. I was totally focused on my not being excessively injured or letting the other dog be torn apart and didn't organize anyone else's interaction, like "I'll hold the legs and you kick it."
If anything it was the opposite of bystander syndrome where everyone thinks someone else will do whatever is needed. Everyone there was doing whatever they could with the tools and knowledge or lack of knowledge that they had.
You cannot ever know what his intentions were, and to accuse him of that is pretty disgusting.
> "My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation."
Why do you think such a terrible leap of logic would work here?
I hope your logic is not: "I can imagine how A might cause X, therefore I believe B cannot possibly cause X." Easy way for people too fool themselves into believing unsupported ideas.
Pit bulls are stronger and more capable of injuring or killing a human than most other breeds.
Both can be true. But if you want the "bad owner" theory to explain why 80% of all fatalities are pit-related , you are essentially calling at 80% percent (or higher) of owners dangerously negligent.
Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.
1. 80% of fatal dog attacks are by pit bulls.
This is complete nonsense from dogsbite.org actually nobody tracks this. This "statistic" is at best comprised by trying to compile news articles that notoriously misidentify any large breed mutt responsible for attacks as pit bulls.
2. If 80% of fatal are attacks are caused by pit bulls and negligent owners were the cause of attacks then 80% of owners must be negligent.
3. 80% of owners being negligent is an absurd conclusion thus the conclusion that bites are largely caused by negligent owners must be false.
Premise 2 is the result of what I like to call number gluing. To explicate people have 2 entities which they can attach a numerical identity to that seem related so people just mentally stick them together instead of doing the mathematical reasoning to figure out how the 2 relate. It's not that they don't "exactly" relate how you said they do they don't relate AT ALL. With no other numbers its entirely impossible to reason about which portion of owners are negligent or even how their average negligence relates to owners of say rottweilers and dobermans. There are 3.6 million pit bulls in the US and 40 people are killed annually. Even if every fatality was caused by a pit bull we could conclude from that fact that 1 in a million pit bull owners are negligent. The prior poster wasn't distracting from your argument he demolished it like a bulldozer.
2. Shifting all the blame onto owners is ignoring the clear trend. If 100% of gun owners were safe and responsible, there would still be gun deaths because of the capacity of a gun to kill someone. Same with Pits.
3. I agree but that's your logic, not mine.
You are also shifting focus from Pits attacking other dogs (the point of this thread) to attacking people. Fine, they account for most dog attacks on other dogs and on people. You seem to have your own justifications for why that is, and why it's ok, but those only work on you. Because you want to believe your Pitbull is an angel from heaven and not a well trained, but inherently dangerous animal.
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities-2020...
Entry after entry is pitbull.
"Pictured are the two most deadly dog breeds in America: pit bull terriers and rottweilers. Research from DogsBite.org shows that during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, canines killed 471 Americans. Pit bulls and rottweilers accounted for 76% (358) of these deaths."
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/10/25/bsl-and-dog-bites/
> Restricting breed ownership has not reduced the incidence of dog bites. A survey of reported dog bite rates in 36 Canadian municipalities found no difference between jurisdictions with BSL and those without. Likewise, a 2010 Toronto Humane Society survey found no change in dog bites in Ontario in the years before and after Ontario’s BSL.
> Calgary, however, saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years – from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006. Rather than banning breeds, Calgary uses strong licensing and enforcement plus dog safety public education campaigns.
It would be great if you stopped promoting strategies that don't work and started promoting ones that do.
Looking at the link it relies on news paper stories to report that the death happened and then uses the reporters words to correctly identify the breed even though this may actually result in pit bulls being over counted and some fatalities being missed. In fact if you peruse the source its sufficient for an attack to be pit bull related for any given source to refer to the dogs as pit bulls. So if a dozen sources report on the matter and one misidentifies the culprit as a pit bull pit bull kill it is. As an example I found in the first dozen cases a "pit bull kill" wherein nobody saw the person get killed but a neighbor testified that there were problematic dogs in the neighborhood which the neighbor says are pit bulls. I found another which was a literal homicide in which the murderers dog attacked the victim while he was murdering them. It's hard to justify digging through 400 some cases when 1/6th of the first 12 are obviously complete nonsense and the rest are of unknown quality without extensive research not composed of finding newspaper articles and grepping for the word pit in any article about a particular incident.
The citations show the article title but not a url to the actual source making identifying just how bad the source in unnecessarily cumbersome but anyone that spends more than 5 minutes studying it ought to come to the conclusion that dogsbite.org is shockingly not even trying to do an unbiased analysis. It's a hit piece serving the interests of a lobbying group of dog haters who in many cases want to steal people's family pets and kill them to address a problem that kills about the same number of people annually as drowning in bath tubs.
Usually only having one biased source of truth is an indication that you are hanging out with the flat earth society. I invite you to join the rest of us on the round earth.
Sure, doesn't detract from my point at all. Nitpicking numbers is not a good use of anyone's time.
Your entire argument seems to rely solely on attacking the source. Everything I google turns up similar numbers
https://www.caninejournal.com/dog-bite-statistics/ https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-studies.php
If you are going to grab your tin foil hat and claim an internet-wide conspiracy against your dog of choice, fine. I don't see any reason to participate.
Many dogs involved in attacks are erroneously typed as pitbulls (which is, in fact, a designation encompassing at least 3 different distinct breeds); genetic testing later reveals that they were not. Pitbulls are the "Moors" of dog breeds.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331... https://dogbitesohio.com/are-pit-bulls-unfairly-being-design...
Unfortunately, the stigma surrounding pitbulls is influenced by shaky notions of racial and behavioral genetics that mirror eugenics and its progeny.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/08/racism-and-the-americ...
https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/jan/1...
https://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=03214697...
I actually saw this standup bit recently and after Googling, it looks like it was borrowed ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLwYkZUNvKo&feature=youtu.be...
To clarify, it's actually the other way around, the standup came BEFORE the blog. Should have realized the upload date is not the performance date.
https://www.espn.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/3722/shark-atta...
Sharks can't do very much damage to humans because, in the natural course of events, it is impossible for a shark and a human to meet.
But sharks are quite dangerous conditioned on the fact that you're encountering one.
In countries that have good rabies control this is not an issue. For example, the US has 30 - 50 deaths due to dogs each year.
In countries around the world, it's more about packs of wild dogs and rabies, instead of just rabies alone.
Countries/Regions that have wild dog pack problems: India, Some Eastern European countries, South East Asia (almost all people who grew up in South Eastern Asia would have a childhood story of being followed home by a pack of dogs. They are quiet at the beginning, they follow you, and if no one else is home when you get there, LOCK THE DOOR and God protect you), some parts of Australia.
Growing up, I was ashamed that my dad was so scared of dogs, but the dogs he grew up around were incredibly violent and unpredictable compared to the domestics we’re so accustomed to here in the States. I think he and his brothers raised a puppy they found in the village, and it bit him pretty terribly when it grew up, so he has zero trust for animals. And he’s the most rational man I know, so it was weird to see him carry this memory so strongly into his 50s and 60s.
I don’t think he’s ever used it before (he lives in the Bay Area), but he’ll literally turn back from 5 blocks away if he realizes he’s forgotten it. I guess I’m trying to say: these kinds of environments are really traumatizing, and you should totally believe what the parent is saying. It’s a different world out there.
> Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins.
this is straight-up wrong. Humans and sharks interact all. the. time. They're not killing machines.
I imagine you probably know that, so I'm not trying to patronize you (honestly). But this is really important.
SHARKS KILLED 4 HUMANS IN 2018. HUMANS KILLED 100 MILLION SHARKS IN 2018.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/28/shark-a...
Most people spend maybe hours a year in shark ecosystem. Vs 365 days a year in dog country, or mosquito etc.
Swimming with reef sharks vs taking a hike in a malaria infested jungle? Swimming with reef sharks please.
Most sharks will run away from the human as the human and their bubbles look far bigger than they are. They are more intimidated by us than we are by them.
You run into mosquitoes 30k times a year, one of them may kill you, and most of the time you could have saved yourself on your own.
https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?...
Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?
[1] https://www.paho.org/en/topics/chagas-disease
I was curious, so:
> Since 2001, the yearly human death toll caused by stings of bees, wasps and hornets in Japan has been ranging between 12 and 26.[26] Since this number also includes deaths caused by wasps, bees, and other hornet species, the number of deaths caused by Asian giant hornets is likely to be significantly lower.[citation needed]
from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
[26] is a Japanese source that I cannot read.
Seems like they're not a huge threat?
Their nests are pretty cool though. Kinda like a flat hex grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae#/media/File:Assassi...
If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save millions of human lives.
"""Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined. One species, Aedes aegypti, carries diseases such as dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya which make hundreds of millions of people sick every year"""
[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018
[2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-...
This is a horrible way to spend the last few seconds of your life on Earth and it likely triggers all the self-preservation instincts in a human mind, and then some.
The slow, painful death from a debilitating disease like malaria does not even come close for sheer compulsive terror. After all, most people experience sickness at some point during their lives, but very few experience being eaten.
This "raw, visceral horror of being eaten alive by a very big fish" [1] is the reason why people are afraid of shark attacks much more than mosquito bites or even accidents etc.
____________
[1] That's a quote from a National Geographic article I read a few years ago that stuck in my mind. I have no reference to it, apologies. It was in an issue of the print magazine.
https://www.askmen.com/news/entertainment/deers-kill-more-pe...
I'd like to know if the OP manually aligned the columns in the table, if they used a program to do so, or something els.
https://plaintexttools.github.io/plain-text-table/
We get malaria from a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes.
We get tuberculosis from a bacteria that is spread by humans.
TB kills more than three times as many people every year as malaria. Why is malaria counted as a death caused by mosquitoes but TB isn't a death caused by humans? Either you count both or you count neither.
It is probably fair to count TB deaths in the "human kills" category, but I think we usually make a differentiation between human to human disease and disease caused by contact with an animal. It's just the way we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Although I get what you're saying, I don't think that human deaths caused by TB is necessarily what people are interested in when you aggregate all of the of humans at the hand of other humans, which may be why those deaths are omitted.
They're saying that 1,000,000 is the number for mosquitos, not because they kill people but their a carrier of disease.
What they are asking is do we consider other animals in the same capacity, such as, does the number beside humans include human transmittable diseases (HIV for example).
Seems like a reasonable question.
Just to be clear, I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. A rational question can still contain a potential flaw.
But I did misunderstand what they were asking.
Humans are also vectors for pathogens, we just don't count them as such.
They don't count humans the same as other animals, instead, they count homicide/war (intentional killing), and you can just consider it a point of reference. Are you going to count accidents? Suicide? Anything that can be traced to human decisions? Anything that can be traced to human biology?
Any way you count humans, it just isn't going to be equivalent.
First - if you're going to say 'mosquitos kill humans because they transmit disease' and then include humans for a completely different reason (i.e. homicide) makes for an odd comparison.
For example, what if human transmission of the communicable disease results in some massive amount of death, which could very well be the case?
Second - mosquitoes are carrying a lot of otherwise benign things, which most people recover fine from. Possibly things like the flu. Well some people die from the flu, but very rarely. So I'm not sure if the fact it was communicated by a mosquito or something else makes sense.
Maybe inanimate objects, like the door handle to your public building, contribute more to basic pathogen spread, like the flu, in which case again, that would put things in context.
It's a tricky thing to compare lions attacking people to mosquitos that happen to spread in some cases, some minor thing that in may have rare deadly consequences.
Malaria is almost exclusively spread by mosquitos, so there is a certain logic to saying "mosquitos kill a lot of people." But you are right that most times you are bitten by a mosquito, it is nothing but a minor annoyance. It's a bit different from a lion.
Some people include deer in such charts, because people die by crashing their cars into deer. But that is pretty different too.
Besides, there's a very wide gap between what the West is and was willing to do when an infectious disease happens.
When Malaria hit the West, we drained entire swamps (and their ecosystems) without a second though. When corona hits, we justifiably lockdown entire countries. When Malaria hits poor people, it's think about the Mosquitoes. I can't help but think there's a very ugly thing behind this double-standard.
Basically, the West developed and rid itself of a lot of disease and predators. But if developing countries try to do this, all sorts of “environmental” objections are raised.
I have even heard people say that mosquito borne illnesses are good because they keep people in poor nations from expanding into “pristine” forests.
Basically, if there were 100’s of thousands of children dying in the West from malaria, we would do anything to get rid of the problem(and we did). But when it is other people’s children dying, it becomes “think of the mosquitos.”
I don't disagree with you at all, I am just not sure how these concepts are related. Xenophobia?
You're absolutely right that western nations developed by radically altering environments. There's a certain sort of hypocrisy with environmentalists lobbying developing nations. I remember an elementary school trip about DDT and how it affected local peregrine falcon populations.
And we're paying the price now with increased vulnerability to hurricanes. (Swamps absorb the storm)
I think that trade off was well worth the cost.
Nature doesn't care if humans all die. Nature doesn't 'care' at all. Humanity does. And this looks very ugly and very hypocritical.
Last time, we "merely" almost wiped out a whole class of apex predators and caused a collection of trophic cascades. This time, with a menu of unintended consequences only the most obvious of which is the "colony collapse disorder" that's been imperiling pollinators worldwide, we might just end up managing to break modern agriculture entirely and cause famines worldwide, too.
So, yeah, "targeted interventions" merit extreme skepticism, because we as a species suck at them. If you want to look at that through a lens of anti-Westernism, you're welcome.
Nobody expected DDT to drive large birds of prey nearly to extinction. Nobody expected neonicotinoids to concentrate in ecosystems and have a very similar effect on the insects we depend on to pollinate our food crops. It's not about predicting that terrible things will happen. It's that we aren't able to make sure terrible things won't. Neonicotinoids already have us at non-negligible risk of worldwide famine through agricultural collapse as a result of consequences we were too stupid and too hubristic to predict. How many millions do you think that will kill if it happens?
Because that's the kind of risk you're proposing - and, just as with that famine, it's a risk that will hit worst on the most vulnerable, least privileged people in the world. You know? The same ones in whose supposed defense you're making such a performative display of contempt?
P.S. We knew even at the time DDT was poisonous to life, and that draining swamps kills ecosystems. What changed wasn't so much our knowledge, but the situation (the West had gotten rid of many deadly diseases by that time, mosquitoes had started to develop resistance).
The current situation is that many people needlessly die. The current approaches don't work well enough. Various radical approaches to fixing that have been investigated and tested to a significant degree. Now given the cost, testing and various answers to the objections, there comes the time the objections have to put a bit more meat and go beyond people have screwed up before, and something might happen.
Another related example: is it better to have the consequences of polluted cities powered with unclean coal, than to have a less developed country with fewer resources to spend on things like healthcare. Which on net is better? I certainly don't know, but the tradeoffs are real.
The West murdered millions of third world children when we banned DDT.
I did, with a little effort, find a single source [1] for your "DDT didn't harm birds" claim. Of course, he's [2] also a climate denier, a conspiracy theorist, and a lobbyist for companies whose financial interests are coincidentally in total alignment with his "scientific" advocacy. But hey, if that's the company you want to keep, don't let me dissuade you.
[1] http://archive.is/UTyoT#selection-2159.0-2156.3
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-truth-about-...
Silent Spring was a work of fiction, but it killed millions of children in the developing world, and continues to do so to this day. Fortunately at least some have seen the light and relaxed the ban on DDT.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
I'll note that the modern suggestions to eradicate Malaria are more nuanced and at least try to only affect the parasite/host. e.g. releasing sterile males, immunizing the mosquitoes against the parasite[1], ATSBs, a GM fungus to poison mosquitoes, making human blood deadly to the parasite[2], etc.
IMHO (I'm far from an expert), the most promising seems to be releasing sterile males followed by some of the other approaches to deal the death blow to the parasite (though if the mosquito goes I won't be bothered).
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340992/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067008 I wonder whether this can scale...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20937950
I also lived for a time as a child in Manitoba and my grandfather got live altering malaria, so I don't share any love for these insects but we're part of something bigger and just because the west drained entire swamps doesn't mean I support that or that it validates making a species extinct on purpose.
The only reason people are even thinking about it, is because it doesn't affect the West. That's callousness masquerading as environmentalism. %$#@! the ecosystem* . People are more important.
* Nevermind no one has even shown any way that anything aside from the target would be harmed. Or that we could reintroduce the species once the parasite is gone.
You do know humans need a functioning ecology in order to survive, right?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the optimism inherent in a perspective on the world that says there's necessarily a technological solution to everything, and more than that, one that modern-day humans are certainly smart enough to find. I just wish it didn't so lend itself to hubris.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4489809/
There's no balance between the concern we don't have for the many ecologically damaging things humans do for profit and the nagging when we think about intervening with a disease that killed millions.
But that is beside the point and does not matter. What matters are 700,000 human lives annually.
It's tragic really. If we had these diseases in Europe or North America, we would have already done this.
Besides, his statement isn't an argument, and present no facts or information.
> Imbecilic remark. Do you know how many humans would die if we eliminated mosquitos? Any idea?
petters also appears to be correct on what would happen if we had these issues in North America. Your own province kills mosquitos en masse and those ones aren't even carrying deadly disease they are just a nuisance.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deltamethrin-first-u...
Re: Manitoba, spraying to reduce mosquito populations in urban areas is a whole different ball game from extermination.
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
We humans have a long, long "tradition" of exterminating species and we know it will not affect things that really matter to us, like agriculture and water. The number of human deaths will be effectively zero.
Ecosystems adapt. The things eating mosquitoes would find something else to eat, or maybe not. Some species will grow their population, some will reduce. Some species will evolve a bit differently.
The idea that everything will collapse if we eradicate mosquitoes or pandas is just absurd (I have nothing against pandas by the way; I'm just observing that them disappearing did not collapse everything).
Is this actually a thing?
Humanity wipes out species by the dozens each year for no reason and people shrug, but for some reason many people don't want to target the few subspecies that are actually extremely harmful to humans.
First test it on a small isolated island.
I think the main reason people don't like camping or nature is because of mosquitos and biting ants. This dislike of outdoors converts directly to a lack of environmentalism. I don't know the conversion rate, so who knows how much more we'd care for nature minus mosquitos, but if we're destroying the planet either way, we should at least enjoy some part of life without these parasites.
Saber tooth tigers. Check. Dire wolves. Check.
The environment adapted just fine to the loss of these species.
The 1000s of other species made extinct recently... Oops!
...But again, the natural ecosystem didn't irrecoverably collapse.
After eliminating so many much more valuable or interesting species (IMO), I certainly don't want to stop right when we're getting to ticks and mosquitoes.
Well this is the law of unintended consequences in action. Many people don't think it will have any negative effect but we don't know. Nature is extraordinarily complex and disrupting it in such a huge way almost always carries knock-on impact.
What we do know is that mosquitos have killed more humans than probably anything else ever. Shouldn't that be impetus enough to actually do something about it? Of course, the problem is made worse by the fact that the people who are advocating against doing anything aren't the people that mosquitos are killing. If you knew a lot of people who had died from Malaria, you might be singing a different tune.
It's also a straw man. I didn't say we're "too stupid" to "ever know anything." So let's at least engage in good faith.
Should we "do something?" Sure. And we have, for centuries. Did you miss anti malarial drugs, physical detriments and mitigations?
"Advocating against doing anything" is another gross straw man argument.
and a specialist working for an oil company convinced me that climate change happens all the time. he wasn't technically wrong, except that he wasn't around to enjoy those other times to attest that it would be "no big deal".
There's no way it would happen via natural selection. The mosquito is engineered to die. The project has to keep releasing new genetically engineered mosquitos to mate with females.
I totally get the idea that removing all mosquitos would likely lead to spiralling ecosystem collapse, and it's possible that even killing this one species could do so.
But, are you arguing that trying to kill this one species could kill all mosquito species? I just don't see how that's possible with this mechanism.
Note: I think these types of scenarios are unlikely and am in favor of the eradication programs (though I do think we should have smaller-scale trials not just to validate efficacy but also to understand unintended impacts). But we have observed these types of impacts. It isn't just a crazy idea. But nature also seems to me to quite adaptable.
OP asked whether anyone was considering killing all mosquitos? Myself and others replied no, just this one species.
It’s indeed possible that there would be local ill effects, possibly even on other mosquitos. But I don’t see how it would affect mosquitos outside Aedes Aegypti’s habitat.
Also, the species is invasive outside of Africa. This increases the odds it could be safely eliminated in those areas.
I still agree there’s the possibility of great impacts. But I don’t think it could affect “all mosquitos”.
Please beware of this infection and get the medication even if it has strong side effects.
When I travelled to Kenya last year my wife and I took malaria medication, we would do the same if going to a malaria area in SA in summer.
I don't know if travel agencies act similar outside of NZ.
There are going to be a ton of secondary effects due to prematurely closing or clearing out hospitals and clinics, and many people have already died from completely preventable illnesses, with some clinics telling people to not come in when they should have.
[0]: https://unherd.com/thepost/professor-karol-sikora-fear-is-mo...
For example the US Preventative Task Force evaluates evidence and recommends screening guidelines as well as giving the strength of the evidence.
For breast cancer, the only recommended screening is that women age 50 to 74 have mammograms every 2 years. And that is B grade evidence.
https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme...
With screenings, you have to be really careful about selection bias. Basically, screening will catch a larger proportion of slow growing cancer. Also with respect to staging, the slower growing a cancer, the earlier the stage you will catch it at.
My guess would be that if you have a cancer that is rapidly going from stage 1 to stage 2, you would already have a worse outcome and the 2 months screening hiatus is not going to be that big a difference maker.
EDIT:
In case people ask about clinical breast exams and self breast exams, here are the American Cancer Society guidelines:
"Research has not shown a clear benefit of regular physical breast exams done by either a health professional (clinical breast exams) or by women themselves (breast self-exams)."
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/screening-tests-...
So the only guidelines with evidence backing them up call for 2 year screenings. Within that framework, a 2 month delays are not going to be very clinically significant.
Do women normally have breast exams every few months?
Some presumably fairly predictable fraction would have an exam scheduled during the beginning of the epidemic, and a certain fraction of them would have undiagnosed cancer. It seems reasonable to assume significant negative consequences for those people.
You are correct that on an individual level it is a game of chance: if you are going to develop breast cancer it’s a bad thing but if by chance you develop it in the right window of time right before your annual exam, your outcome is likely to be better. But from the point of view of screening a large population stopping testing for a period of time is bad.
Think about it in terms of COVID: what would happen if all testing was shut down for a month? No, not everyone who gets COVID would get it in that month but the people who do will absolutely not get tested, right?
A self-exam once a month is one of those "good hygiene" things, though, and might be a decent idea to promote right now while people are getting cagey.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronaviru...
The key phrase if you want to learn more is "excess deaths"
This excess death mechanism has the potential to be very severe in very poor countries, where famine is likely to follow this plague. It's really quite sad.
I've been part of many miscarriages and doctors can tell you something is wrong but rarely can they fix anything before 12 weeks.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
From delayed diagnostics, to "elective" surgeries that can't take place, to suicides. It's going to be on the order of the direct deaths at least.
The only real measurable indirect improvement is a lot less people dead in traffic accidents.
Possibly. And many will interpret this as the cure being "worse of (or as bad as) the disease".
But what we should really be comparing this to is the number of deaths we'd have if we didn't do anything to reduce the spread.
Anybody has good simulation data that takes into account what we learned so far?
But regardless none of it is any good for anyone.
Although both mechanisms would bear some relation, it looked to me more like it was driven by spread of the infection rather than changes to behavior.
The point that you can't really separate them completely is well-taken though.
EDIT: I'm clearly all over the place with terminology. Something along the lines of looking at the (all_cause_mortality - covid_deaths - historic_avg) residual and seeing how closely it mirrors say alpha*covid_deaths where alpha is some constant. If it mirrored it well (or for example preceded it and the lock downs in the manner that would be expected of infection) one might infer that those deaths were probably covid. If on the other hand they were strictly related to the time the news broke and lock downs and changes to hospital admittance rates, then it might be better explained as resulting from lockdown issues.
Yea absolutely. I haven't seen yet seen any analysis that does this, but I'm sure one will come along soon
I feel sad to hear
The idea is to create modified mosquitoes that can't bite or breed and release them to "breed" with the general populous thus neutralizing them.
Otherwise this reminds me of well-meaning efforts to control erosion by planting Kudzu or Himalayan Blackberry everywhere. Ultimately they just become an invasive species. And I could also see eradicating mosquitoes as removing a food species for many other animals. This is a really bad idea.
>We conclude that predators and parasites have a limited but significant effect on overall mosquito populations, and their role should be considered when implementing habitat management, mosquito control and when modeling mosquito population dynamics.
From a study http://e-m-b.org/sites/e-m-b.org/files/European_Mosquito_Bul...
The problems eradication solves are obvious and important to solve.
The problems eradication might cause are less obvious and are potentially disastrous.
Many of the mosquitos are invasive species anyway. The point being, there are many many of species which would fill up the ecological niche left if we extincted a few.
Next to that it's not only the side effect of extinction of one species, but also the unforeseen side effects of the technologies used to accomplish this (extreme) extinction.
The whole point of technologists is that they really have to much faith that we both understand these complex ecosystems and complex technologies we just started using.
To try to put a technology on grand scale that you don't fully understand and can't control once in the wild is really stupid.
I really want to believe that doing this would be something that humans should explore, but I think the chance of something going wrong is fairly high. Considering our rather terrible track record with stuff like this (weapons, pesticides, etc).
It often takes decades to truly see how it works, so while we may end the mosquitos problem we may make ourselves a worse one.
Also, the mosquito lifecycle is as little as a week or two from egg to egg. The process would be rather fast.
https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf - review by GiveWell, and independent charity evaluator
$2 donation results in 1 net that lasts 3-4 years protecting 1.8 people on average from malaria $3
I haven't read it, but a recent review (https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n11/steven-shapin/drain-the-..., possibly behind a paywall) suggested Sonia Shah's The Fever to be a better book on the topic.
The second big factor is what it would need to develop. This isn’t a directed process - something needs to confer a benefit of some sort early to be selected for, not just after hundreds of generations. If you’re talking about a major change like completely changing mammalian skin, that sounds very complicated compared to other things (such as improved immune function for the specific disease killing people), and there’s an arms race if all you’re doing is selecting for mosquitoes with better bites which might not be winnable.
Finally, there’s the question of downsides: do the mutations producing this leave you more vulnerable to other conditions, less likely to attract mates, etc. If that tough skin costs more to grow, you’re paying the cost upfront even if you’re living somewhere without a huge mosquito population, so it might be maladaptive for too much of the total population to maintain.
The downsides discussion is particularly relevant in the case of sickle cell anemia, which is believed to be a side effect of an evolved malaria resistance – beneficial if you live in an area where it’s common but a net loss if you do not:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20450-how-sickle-cell...
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-insects-die-from-people-stepp...
I wouldn't be surprised if birds and spiders kill far more insects than people.
If you count things like pollution, pesticides, land use, they absolutely don't.
Insect populations have been reduced to a fraction of their former size over the last few decades due to human activity.
> True, this tiny insect does not do the job on its own. What makes it so dangerous is its capacity to transmit viruses or other parasites that cause devastating diseases.
If you catch Covid-19 from a kiss, we don’t say the other person killed you. We firmly blame the disease not the person who transmits it. “Well your honor, Sally didn’t do it on her own, it was her capacity to transmit viruses or other parasites. But mostly her.”
These all seem communicable, but we don’t blame humans:
“Lower respiratory infections remained the most deadly communicable disease, causing 3.0 million deaths worldwide in 2016. The death rate from diarrhoeal diseases decreased by almost 1 million between 2000 and 2016, but still caused 1.4 million deaths in 2016. Similarly, the number of tuberculosis deaths decreased during the same period, but is still among the top 10 causes with a death toll of 1.3 million. HIV/AIDS is no longer among the world’s top 10 causes of death, having killed 1.0 million people in 2016 compared with 1.5 million in 2000.”
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
Yes if you infect someone intentionally that’s different, but the mosquito isn’t trying to kill you.
From the article:
> (humans by the way are second behind the mosquito, causing 475,000 deaths every year)
If it’s not humans killing when we transmit, then it’s not mosquitoes. If the transmitter is involved then humans crush mosquitoes.
[0]https://healthclinics.superdrug.com/is-malaria-contagious/
And yet, we never seem to hear this fact on the News...
Yet we do get stories of the form "X killed Y people", where X is some person/group/phenomenon, and Y < 725,000...
And usually, Y is not just less, but several orders of magnitude less -- than 725,000...
Also... if you happen to leave a window open at night (accidentally, not intentionally, I might add!), and a mosquito should happen to get in -- does that make you an "accessory to murder" ?
?
Not sure where you get your news but I’ve heard this mentioned regularly on NPR in coverage about the impacts of climate change, outbreaks, programs testing things like the genetically-engineered sterile mosquito releases, and local programs which are trying to reduce it even if it’s not a high cause of death in the United States. Remember when Zika got heavy coverage?
Most likely because A. it disproportionally impacts poorer people in far-off countries and B. It's harder to sell as an enemy/scapegoat compared to other humans/groups/foods/illnesses
My sister got caught in one of them. Not fun. She was covered in the little bastards.
1. What is the distribution of this number across geographical regions? Is it uniformly spread across all regions? Are some regions outliers?
2. The distribution of this number over time of the year in every geographic region is perhaps an interesting thing to look at for short-term solutions.
What do folks in malaria country do? Scavenge their childrens' mosquito nets to catch fish etc. Reject modern medicine and go to the local quack. Foul their water supplies and poach their endangered species.
I know, we can have all the morals we can afford. But some large-scale coordinated actions require a populace that is educated and willing.
Wendover did a great video on risk recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtX-Ibi21tU
Fortunately with study we will beat it. But to laugh at the risk of Covid is foolhardy.
If we are including diseases why not count bats?
Insects as a whole are of crucial planetary importance.
clickbait
> 18.08.2017
Hydroxycholorquine has proven to be effective against Malaria, which is terrible and can be deadly, but proven ineffective and in fact can make worse COVID, so it's not recommended to be used there. Makes sense to me.
https://www.nxg.news/2020/05/26/26496/coronavirus-no-who-bar...
Seems pretty harmless I guess?
I clearly remember starting to get louder and more aggressive and then I blacked out. I woke up in a pool of my own sweat several days later wondering what had happened.
People talked to me about what happened I piece together bits and pieces floating around in a red haze and having a human pile on top of me.
In retrospect the weirdest part was how readily they accepted I was sane again.
It's not related to the sort of mental effects of antimalarials mentioned in GP's comment.
Sure, these side effects may be uncommon, but they're a hell of a lot more common than they are if you don't take hydroxychloroquine.
Incidentally, it's an open secret that a lot of the popular NSAIDs wouldn't be OTC if they were discovered today. Specifically because NSAIDs aren't just "safe", over the counter dosages are quite low--low enough that they're ineffective in many cases, which is why the same NSAIDs are prescribed at orders of magnitude higher doses.
There's historical precedent for "safe" drugs being problematic during a pandemic: aspirin poisoning was a significant cause of death during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
Here is what the CDC says about hydroxychloroquine. To call it "unsafe" is ridiculous and spreading misinformation.
Hydroxychloroquine is a relatively well tolerated medicine. The most common adverse reactions reported are stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and headache. These side effects can often be lessened by taking hydroxychloroquine with food.Hydroxychloroquine may also cause itching in some people.
All medicines may have some side effects. Minor side effects such as nausea, occasional vomiting, or diarrhea usually do not require stopping the antimalarial drug. If you cannot tolerate your antimalarial drug, see your health care provider; other antimalarial drugs are available
My point is, that even if it's safer than acetaminophen (which is not in evidence) that's doesn't mean it's safe. Which is a direct contradiction to your glib, "Wrong."
Currently CDC refers to NIH for advice about using Hydroxychloroquine:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-op...
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/whats-new/
> Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine:
> The Panel recommends against using high-dose chloroquine (600 mg twice daily for 10 days) for the treatment of COVID-19 (AI), because the high dose carries a higher risk of toxicities than the lower dose.
> The FDA warning that cautioned against the use of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 outside the setting of a hospital or clinical trial was added to this section.
Do they say this because it's a safe drug? No, they say it because it kills more people than it helps when used to treat covid-19.
No, it's considered safe compared to malaria.
> High dosages should be avoided by people with heart trouble/high blood pressure.
...because it's dangerous for those people.
Because:
1. The article doesn't mention hydroxychloroquine and
2. Hydroxychloroquine is being touted as a cure to Covid 19, a claim that has its basis in politics, not science. Part of the claim being made is exactly the (wrong) claim you were defending: that hydroxychloroquine is safe--as if safe/unsafe were a binary.
If you go from an article about malaria to an only tangentially-related topic of hydrochloroquine and basically parrot Trump's untrue claim that hydrochloroquine is perfectly safe, you shouldn't be surprised if people assume that you're agreeing with Trump's claim that hydrochloroquine should be used to treat Covid-19.
Understand that claims occur in a context. The CDC's claim that hydrochloroquine is well-tolerated is in the context of treating a very deadly disease (malaria) that it is proven to treat. Your claim that hydrochloroquine is safe occurs in the context of treating a much less deadly disease (Covid 19) which it may actively exacerbate. Maybe you intended your claim in the context of treating malaria with hydrochloroquine, but that wasn't the context you said it in.
It is safe. It is provably safe. Period. End of sentence. No qualifications. Many people take it daily for various diseases for long periods of time. Is it safe for everyone? No. No drug is safe for everyone. But for the majority it is safe. Go do the research, which you haven't based on what you're saying.
This has nothing to do about Trump, and I don't care what he says. I do care what the FDA and CDC have to say, and I have bothered to actually research this deeply.
You may not want to believe science, and you want to follow your political/religious beliefs that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug, so go ahead. Don't believe for one second that you're following science. There are other posts in this thread from people who have taken the drug daily, and there's research from other non-white countries (which you probably will discount). The FDA considers it safe. The CDC considers it safe. Canada considers it safe. India considers it safe. Every country safely prescribes its use for malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. The study that said it was unsafe has been heavily criticized. If you don't want to follow science, then that's fine, but at least realize that you aren't following it. Don't pretend that you are when really you're just following politics and your own beliefs.
> Every country safely prescribes its use for malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
This is a misunderstanding, and misuse, of the word safe. No medication is safe. We balance the harms caused against the benefits gained.
>We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I don't know why you connected what I said with anything to do with COVID-19. I didn't say that it helped, in fact, I think it was bad science that lead to that belief. But the fact that hydroxychloroquine is safe is beyond argument.
This is from the CDC:
Hydroxychloroquine is a relatively well tolerated medicine. The most common adverse reactions reported are stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and headache. These side effects can often be lessened by taking hydroxychloroquine with food. Hydroxychloroquine may also cause itching in some people.
All medicines may have some side effects. Minor side effects such as nausea, occasional vomiting, or diarrhea usually do not require stopping the antimalarial drug. If you cannot tolerate your antimalarial drug, see your health care provider; other antimalarial drugs are available
Regardless, no it’s not “safe beyond argument”. Let’s try again.
FDA:
>”Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine:
- should be used for COVID-19 only when patients can be appropriately monitored in the hospital as required by the EUA or are enrolled in a clinical trial with appropriate screening and monitoring. FDA is reviewing the safety of their use when used outside of the setting of hospitalized patients for whom use was authorized. have not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19. are being studied in clinical trials for COVID-19, and FDA authorized their temporary use during the COVID-19 pandemic under limited circumstances through the EUA, and not through regular FDA approval.
- being used under the EUA when supplied from the Strategic National Stockpile, the national repository of critical medical supplies to be used during public health emergencies. can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation can cause dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia.
- pose risks that may increase when these medicines are combined with other medicines known to prolong the QT interval, including the antibiotic azithromycin, which is also being used in some COVID-19 patients without FDA approval for this condition.
- should be used with caution in Patients who also have other health issues such as heart and kidney disease, who are likely to be at increased risk of these heart problems when receiving these medicines.”
>“Be aware that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine can:
- cause QT prolongation
- increase the risk of QT prolongation in patients with renal insufficiency or failure
- increase insulin levels and insulin action causing increased risk of severe hypoglycemia
- cause hemolysis in patients with Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency
- interact with other medicines that cause QT prolongation even after discontinuing the medicines due to their long half-lives of approximately 30-60 days”
https://www.fda.gov/safety/medical-product-safety-informatio...
How about finding information about hydroxychlorquine on its own? This is from the FDA itself:
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2007/00...
I suggest you actually try to do some deeper research besides just reading politicized versions of information. First and foremost, educate yourself on the differences between hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, they are two different chemicals. Just like how "dihydrogen monoxide" and "hydrogen sulfate" are two different chemicals, even though they have the word "hydrogen" in them.
I read the document you linked to, and it outlines the potential risks and side effects of the medication and clearly specified that it should be administered with the supervision of a doctor. This adds evidentiary weight against your original claim that it is “safer than acetaminophen” (which yes, is also dangerous if misused), and you still haven’t provided any evidence whatsoever for that claim. I’ll wait.
All drugs have risks and benefits. Some of those risks can be magnified in nonlinear ways based on many potential interactions, which is why people should rely on medical advice from their doctors, and should fully ignore opinions from ping_pong.
For some uses, the benefits outweigh the risks. Context matters. Is grapefruit juice safe? It depends. In combination with some medications, it can kill you.
However, to more reasonable people, hydroxychloroquine is safe because the vast majority of people can take it daily for decades without any adverse effects. People with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis take it daily, with most having no adverse effects. It's provably more safe than a drug like Acetominophen. Are there people who suffer adverse effects by taking it? Yes. But it's a small minority of people. And if the only definition of "safe" is that no one ever gets adverse effects, then there is no such chemical that qualifies to be safe, including water. Water in large enough doses will kill people.
The reason why I'm saying it's politicized is because the very mention of the drug has become politicized. Look at your reaction and other responses. I never mentioned COVID-19, and you were the one to bring it up. The drug has been caught up in the nonsense with COVID-19 and Trump taking it, but that was never the point. I never mentioned that, all I did was talk about whether or not it's safe, which it is. People like you who know nothing about the drug start echoing talking points from the news because you think you're so much smarter than other people, and yet you don't even read basic information about the drug. If you did, you would speak more educatedly about the drug instead of parrot what you heard on Twitter.
If you don't believe what was written by the CDC and the FDA, then that's your right to believe whatever it is that you want. But it's not science, it's religion. You want to believe that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug even against science. Even the research paper that you linked to has been resoundly criticized with science and math. But I guess since you religiously believe what you want to believe, you'll stick with believing that the paper is correct instead of following the science.
Observational and case control studies in India showed there were "no major side effects" of taking the drug as a prophylactic, ICMR Director-General Balram Bhargava said.
Cases of nausea, vomiting and heart palpitations were noted, he added.
Last week, the ICMR—which is leading the government's response to the virus—expanded its advisory for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure.
The body said all healthcare workers in hospitals and some frontline personnel could now take the drug for up to several weeks under strict medical supervision.
"We recommended that for prophylaxis, it should be continued, because there is no harm. Benefit may be there," Bhargava told reporters.
Bhargava added that when the ICMR weighed the risks and benefits of the drug, it decided that "we should not deny it to our frontline workers and healthcare workers."
Well, I'm just gonna quote that so you can't change it.
It's "unsafe" in the same way that any medicine if misused is unsafe -- but not more so than most others.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/19772-hydroxychl...
Here’s a 2013 NIH article about a rare heart condition.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3760572/
why haven't we been in lockdown every year until this deadly scourge has been exterminated?
and no, it's not that the current pandemic was more uncertain. even by january/february, it was clearly less contagious and deadly than the 1918 flu. we had good bounds on potential trajectory by early march, when many lockdowns were being implemented.
You do know that mosquitoes have wings and can move from place to place without humans right?
So when you have a cheap solution that works, why would you want to do something expensive that does not even work any better than the cheap solution?
Other than making a nonsensical ideological statement, that is.
covid is trending toward the same death rate. therefore, we should lock down against mosquitos to be consistent.
i get it, cognitive dissonance sucks, but "nonsensical ideologies" indulge in the panic and anxiety rather than fortifying your resolve against the hysteria. your fear is someone else's power.
Ehh, not exactly. I used to live in Africa, parts where there were tstsi flies and mosquitos. Despite being given nets by the Gates foundation, people rarely used them. Well, some used them as hair nets, others through them away because their pastors convinced them their purpose was to sterilize the African people, etc etc.
Probably because 700k/year is globally, while the US alone has suffered 100k deaths in 3 months.
And no mosquito outbreak has caused entire hospital systems to collapse in various parts of the world.
Dengue is way more serious than COVID19. Particularly worrisome, having had dengue makes subsequent reinfections more life-threatening, not less.
There are ways to eradicate the mosquito -- mainly getting rid of small clear water containers near/within your home, such as vases and empty plant pots -- but we still don't do it until it's too late and becomes a problem. A single neighbor who doesn't do this endangers the whole block. And the authorities don't give a fuck. It's infuriating, really.
So to rephrase your question, why don't we do something about it? It's way more actionable than COVID19 (though lockdowns don't work for the reasons others told you). So who knows?
You seem to be strangely unaware of the large amount of money which has been spent for decades on mosquito control by individuals and all levels of government. There are widespread control campaigns, active research into developing new weapons (e.g. traps which are effective against tiger mosquitoes), and community awareness to get more people involved with habitat control and using things like bed nets.
I mean, does this sound like not doing something?
https://www.epa.gov/mosquitocontrol/success-mosquito-control...
Several companies have been working for years on genetic modifications to disrupt mosquito spread:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/genetically_modified_mosquito...
Which government are you talking about? I don't live in the US and you linked to EPA and Yale. I can tell you my government is doing very little to combat dengue fever, and when they do, it's too little, too late.
> widespread control campaigns [...] community awareness
There's very little of that. And one careless neighbor effectively endangers the whole apartment block.
Recent birthday party, 20 people, every single one caught the disease.
Hospital systems would collapse because of the number of sick people. Doctors and nurses would be missing because they would almost all likely fall sick.
And people who would not die of COVID would die of other stuff because healthcare systems would have collapsed.
This is what happened in Italy. This is what was happening in NYC for a few days at its worst. This is what is about to happen in Brazil and possibly in India.
I read just a couple of days ago that the IFR (infection fatality rate) is only ~0.25%-0.3%? Still ~four times higher than that of the flu, but not ten times greater.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
(It's a shame HN doesn't support strike-through; that is my preferred way to retract a post without just deleting it in shame.)
One does not simply question the official corona narrative here without being censored by downvoting or flagging.
But answering your question: that's because such scenario was not developed and funded. Yet.
Honestly, I find the dialogue here toxic and coarse, and I'm sure I'm a part of that, too. Ideally I'd just delete my account, and never come back... But HN won't allow me to delete my account, so, in spite, I'll keep coming back.
Now... I don't even know. HN and Reddit are pretty well useless, and the only thing that keeps me around Reddit are automotive and industrial/machining subs. Seems strange that it was only 8 years ago.
Member when HN was overwhelmingly pro meritocracy? I member.
I really miss reading King Terry's diatribes in showdead. You'd probably be outright banned for that on here now.
I don't think people downvoted as much back then either.
People today seem to be scared to death to think different (not as in apple).