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A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

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

#21

Post by lenerdenator »

nemomarx wrote: post #18
shahsjsjjsz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having cats is an option that is not seriously considered. Dogs are even worse. Make them shit in your own backyard please. If you are a city dweller please do not keep “pets”, it’s bloody ridiculous, thank you.

We've been keeping pets as a species for considerably longer than we've had cities. It's basically an ingrained part of how we react to animals now.

Beyond that, longer than we've had the written word.

Domestication of animals might be the single greatest achievement of humans.

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

#23

Post by everdrive »

andreime wrote: post #4
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.

Please name a better alternative, I'm very curious.

One where people don't travel very much.

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

#24

Post by hagbard_c »

rob74 wrote: post #9
mc32 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the alternatives people rather avoid considering?

Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.

You first?

Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.

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

#26

Post by abanana »

dosisking wrote: post #17

It's hard to take an article that uses the word 'ginormous' seriously

It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.

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

#28

Post by croes »

swader999 wrote: post #12

We need lock downs, a wall, 100% containment. Full vaccine mobilization. Starship must be expedited. A world without cats is not a world at all.

A world with cats is a world with billions of dead birds and small mammals.

Without them we will have even more insects.

So this time cats won’t protect us from diseases by killing the carrier, these time they help the carriers

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

#29

Post by rob74 »

hagbard_c wrote: post #24
rob74 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.

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

Sorry if that wasn't obvious, I wasn't proposing it, I just wanted to come up with an example of a solution that "no one would seriously consider".

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

#30

Post by kevlened »

feverzsj wrote: post #14

Deadly to immunocompromised people. Basically everything could be deadly to them. Cats also rarely attack human proactively. So not really a big concern.

It can be airborne, lives on sanitized surfaces for up to 10 weeks, and may take 3 years for symptoms to appear.

Still, it is more concerning for cats than humans.

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