3 ms·

So now that we've begun factory farming cockroaches, how long until a cockroach-pox emerges?

thaumasiotes 8y ago
The plus side of this is that while cows and pigs are evolutionarily quite close to humans, and chickens are still fairly close, cockroaches are radically different biologically. (e.g. cowpox causes sores in the cow's skin, and in your skin, whereas cockroaches don't even have skin.) The most plausible way for humans to be affected would be for some parasite to have a lifecycle that involves both cockroaches and humans. Imagine you caught a horrible disease that weakened your leg spines, or made your antennae fall off, or reduced the efficiency of your haemolymph in binding oxygen to copper. How much would you care about any of that?
- smsm42 8y ago
  Yersinia pestis (aka the plague) comes to mind. Its lifecycle involves fleas and mammals. The twist is also the way it interacts with the flea blocks flea's digestive tract, which makes the flea be permanently hungry and bite so much more to try to feed itself. Which also spreads the infection, of course. So the disease can be harmful for both insects and mammals despite different biology.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    >> The most plausible way for humans to be affected would be for some parasite to have a lifecycle that involves both cockroaches and humans. So the plague is a disease that arose in mammals and infects humans, with fleas as an (affected) vector. The threat of disease from farmed animals is generally that the large population of animals and close contact between them and the farmers allows diseases of that animal to transfer into the human population. This is extremely implausible for cockroaches. It would be easier for a disease/parasite to use humans as a cockroach-to-cockroach vector than to directly infect the humans -- as you describe in reverse for plague -- but I don't see that farming cockroaches increases that threat in a manner comparable to how farming pigs dramatically increases the threat of the existence of pig diseases (since there are more pigs). The cockroaches on a farm have extensive direct contact with each other; there won't be much percentage in spreading through a human.

The plus side of this is that while cows and pigs are evolutionarily quite close to humans, and chickens are still fairly close, cockroaches are radically different biologically. (e.g. cowpox causes sores in the cow's skin, and in your skin, whereas cockroaches don't even have skin.) The most plausible way for humans to be affected would be for some parasite to have a lifecycle that involves both cockroaches and humans. Imagine you caught a horrible disease that weakened your leg spines, or made your antennae fall off, or reduced the efficiency of your haemolymph in binding oxygen to copper. How much would you care about any of that?

smsm42 8y ago
Yersinia pestis (aka the plague) comes to mind. Its lifecycle involves fleas and mammals. The twist is also the way it interacts with the flea blocks flea's digestive tract, which makes the flea be permanently hungry and bite so much more to try to feed itself. Which also spreads the infection, of course. So the disease can be harmful for both insects and mammals despite different biology.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  >> The most plausible way for humans to be affected would be for some parasite to have a lifecycle that involves both cockroaches and humans. So the plague is a disease that arose in mammals and infects humans, with fleas as an (affected) vector. The threat of disease from farmed animals is generally that the large population of animals and close contact between them and the farmers allows diseases of that animal to transfer into the human population. This is extremely implausible for cockroaches. It would be easier for a disease/parasite to use humans as a cockroach-to-cockroach vector than to directly infect the humans -- as you describe in reverse for plague -- but I don't see that farming cockroaches increases that threat in a manner comparable to how farming pigs dramatically increases the threat of the existence of pig diseases (since there are more pigs). The cockroaches on a farm have extensive direct contact with each other; there won't be much percentage in spreading through a human.