Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

sciencenews.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 165 posts

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#151

Post by everdrive »

elzbardico wrote: post #59
everdrive wrote: post #2

Everything is spreading. We're a large interconnected world, and we'll inherit everyone's problems eventually. There are better alternatives, but it's not something people will seriously consider.

Do you live in the American continent? Look at the skin tone of most people you find in the streets. Go to a library and try to find out what was the average skin tone in your region 600 years ago. Compare both. Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has alwa…

>World commerce is older than you think.

I'm aware that trade networks long precede recorded history, and potentially precede fully-modern humans. The fact that you can have homsapien admixture (eg: homo sapiens + denisovans) far, far outside of Africa is proof enough for that.

The time scales did use to be different, and speeding things up as much as possible does not seem to be a good thing.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#152

Post by soiltype »

elzbardico wrote: post #135
soiltype wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doin…

Natural boundary crossing isn't rare; it's the mechanism that built much of the biosphere. Every fucking oceanic island on Earth, Hawaii, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Mascarenes, was stocked entirely by organisms that crossed open ocean or sky without any help from us. The entire South American primate and caviomorph rodent lineages (everything from capuchins to capybaras) descend from African ancestors that rafte…

Rare is relative. Those changes all happened over much longer timescales and with far fewer species involved in a given ecosystem. It's not the same thing as what we're doing. You're making essentially the same argument as "Earth's climate has always been changing, what's the big deal?"

The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture.

Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#153

Post by thoughtpalette »

Finnucane wrote: post #89
thoughtpalette wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pill pocket treats have been great for this exact purpose.

None of my cats would eat those. Regular soft cat treats have always worked better.

Ahh, YMMV then. My cats go nuts for them. We call them their "special meatball"

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#154

Post by hagbard_c »

symian wrote: post #54
hagbard_c wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You first? Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of t…

We are in the midst of a great extinction event. It’s the only extinction event caused by one species. We are quite bad for the planet’s ecosystem and things like factory farming of cows and pigs cause great suffering. Having far fewer humans on the planet would be a great benefit to other species and to humanity.

We're not in the midst of a great extinction event and even if we were it would not be the first one caused by a single species. Probably the first one was caused by the appearance of Cyanobacteria some 2.7 billion years ago which started to make use of sunlight through photosynthesis. A few hundred million years later the produced oxygen started seeping into the atmosphere and boom, nearly all anaerobic life on the planet was wiped out.

We are part of the ecosystem no matter how much you try to deny it. The planet will abide, humans most likely as well. If you want to call for fewer humans on the planet - something which seems to be the future anyway since births are rapidly declining almost everywhere - that's fine but realise you're just following others like Malthus who did so before. Malthus was proven wrong many times over, you will be proven wrong as well since if there's one thing humans are good at it is adapting to a changing environment. If it gets colder humans adapt, that's how we made it through the series of glaciations. If it gets warmer humans adapt, that's how we made it through e.g. the Roman and Viking age warm periods.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#156

Post by AdamN »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #97
AdamN wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be crazy but I feel like we shouldn't be giving medicine to animals with communicable diseases (unless the medicine reduces the chances of animal->human transmission). We're just reducing the effectiveness of these medicines over time.

Citation needed. We ought to have learned after the Covid “herd immunity” policies that killed hundreds of thousands around the world, that infectious disease control should be grounded on actual research, and not on simplified world models. Researchers currently recommend treatment.

They recommend treatment because the mandate is to keep the animals alive, not whether or not it's good long term for humans. Many doctors and vets though are against the mass use of antibiotics in industrial farming (literally as a prophylactic so they get the antibiotics just in case) but it's not having much of an impact it seems.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#157

Post by nDRDY »

greenavocado wrote: post #149
nDRDY wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't tell me you're recommending that people smell their DIY chlorine chemistry to determine what they've made?

There is no problem at 200 ppm. Skill issue

You're saying that as long as it proceeds as expected, then all will be ok. In the worst case (eg, at the 2,000ppm you indicate as an upper range, or after some mis-step in the process), what ppm chlorine gas would be created, and what would happen if you got a noseful of that at close quarters?

This is just terrible advice.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#158

Post by aa-jv »

Guthwine wrote: post #150
aa-jv wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for sure. Any animal kept from its natural environment and harvested for its material resources is a slave. Doesn't matter if humans thing they're cute, tasty, or necessary. We literally enslave other living beings in order to feel good about ourselves. Pets are emotional slaves. People keep them because of the emotional value they provide to their lifestyles.

In the past, though, dogs (domesticated wolves, however you want to look at it) were more akin to 'hunting partners', wouldn't you say? But for you the line is crossed when we start keeping them in kennels/breeding them, I guess?

No, actually the line is crossed when people who keep slaves are dishonest about it.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#159

Post by georgemcbay »

jsiepkes wrote: post #147
georgemcbay wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, transdermal maropitant (cerenia) worked very well for my cat who was dealing with both CKD and IBD in her later years (she passed away in December). I bought it off of Chewy, but there are other places that compound it into a transdermal as well. > Your last sentence, "[pilling cat] (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth" must mean you have a very chill cat [emphasis mine]. I'm not the pers…

> Some drugs are available online / locally through compounding pharmacies as transdermal creams that you apply to the inner surface of the cat's ear. > Can confirm, transdermal maropitant (cerenia) worked very well for my cat who was dealing with both CKD and IBD in her later years (she passed away in December). Thank you both for the tip! I'm going to look in to that. Sorry to hear your cat passed away :( > Luckily…

> Sorry to hear your cat passed away :(

Thanks.

She made it to ~18 (just over 16 years with me and she was estimated to be about 2 by the shelter I adopted her from, but they weren't exactly sure) despite the various health issues, so it wasn't a big shock when she passed away but its still awful to lose them. Be good to your guy while you still can.

The one other thing that helped with my cat for some medications is, where possible, stuffing the pill into a gel cap (you can buy bags of like hundreds of caps pretty inexpensively) that's just big enough to fit the pill. This increases the size a bit, of course, but for any particularly bitter medication it at least masks the mouth taste.

They even have some vet-specific gel caps made to taste like chicken, etc. Those never worked any better than non-flavored ones for my cat, though anecdotally I guess they do work for some cats enough that they will voluntarily eat the pill.

Re: A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

#160

Post by giardini »

userulluipeste wrote: post #142
giardini wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

userulluipeste says "Affections like rabies" and "Any kind of pandemic is scary by the sheer magnitude of its reach, but one that would affect the brain? That would be another level of scary." "Affections"? Are you talking about socialism or Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) perhaps?

Now, after you quoted me, I see that "affection" in the medical sense is considered archaic: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affection#English I'll keep this in mind, thank you. As for your question, I have little to do with USA politics, which includes holding little to no attitude towards POTUS, and I very much hope for situation to stay that way. Prudence compels me to refrain from saying anything more on the subje…

Or you could use "afflictions" rather than "affections". I don't often see the use of "affection" in the medical sense. Good comparison here:

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/232933/affection-vs-...

Post reply on HN