7 ms·

This brings up an important point many folks may not realize: our immune system a robust multilayered, highly redundant response against any normal bacterium or

This brings up an important point many folks may not realize: our immune system a robust multilayered, highly redundant response against any normal bacterium or virus. Thus, Any pathogen that currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses. And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts.

hammock 4y ago
Sometimes our immune systems don’t work though. In that case we need vaccines. Please don’t forget that
- realjhol 4y ago
  Sometimes, but other times e.g. COVID-19, our immune systems work extremely well in all except the very elderly and obese.
  - hammock 4y ago
    I’m sorry you are a victim of deplorable disinformation. The vaccines actually prime our immune system to fight the infection, and Covid is killing children not just the elderly and body positive
    - MaxfordAndSons 4y ago
      Sorry this is ot, but I can't help but note: replacing "obese" with "body positive" is a wildly Orwellian linguistic move. They aren't remotely synonymous, nor do the groups they actually denote fully overlap (not all obese people are body positive, nor are all body positive people obese).
      - groestl 4y ago
        It's so over the top that it actually registered as cynism with me.
    - realjhol 4y ago
      The evidence is all out in the open now - there's really no hiding from it any more. In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know the risk of serious adverse effects was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 change of serious adverse effects: 22-Sep-22 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/ The UK government has now published its estimate of the number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a COIVD-19 hospitalisation: 25-Jan-2023 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1131409/appendix-1-of-jcvi-statement-on-2023-covid-19-vaccination-programme-8-november-2022.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... For example in the 20-29 year no-risk group, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one hopitalisation is 168,200. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate 706,500. Even in the at-risk group for 20-29 years, the numbers are 7500 and 59,500 respectively. In fact there was no group except for 70+ where the risk of hospitalisation (not severe requiring oxygen), came close to the risk associate with vaccine injury. It's for this reason, that these mRNA vaccines are no longer being offered by the NHS. Look - I'm sorry you were lied to, but at some point you've just go to hold your hands up and admit the truth of the matter. Edit: plenty of downvotes, but no refutation.
      - ramraj07 4y ago
        Here’s your refutation: many of these results confound pre omicron Covid with omicron Covid - the former was 10-100x deadlier, and totally warranted global mandating of the vaccines even with the published SAR rates. After omicron, it is absolutely true that the adverse reaction rate from mRNA vaccines might not be worth the benefit of avoiding the relatively less fatal omicron variant diseases for young individuals. I will agree that regulatory agencies and many pro vaccine arguments are doing a disservice by not being thorough about such distinctions. That doesn’t mean the choices made pre omicron were invalidated. The mRNA vaccines did a great job and did them in time to protect millions more lives from being lost.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        You're comparing apples with oranges. The majority of the serious adverse effects reported in the original trials the first paper rehashes (15.1 effects per 10000 above a 6.4 effect per 10000 placebo baseline with some people reporting multiple effects, after the authors stripped out SAE's where the placebo group reported worse outcomes...) did not involve hospitalisation, never mind intubation. And a significant proportion of COVID infections that do not require hospitalisation (i.e not counted in the NNV metric) nevertheless involve serious adverse effects including both those credibly associated with vaccine side effects but more commonly in symptomatic COVID patients (myocarditis) and those not thought to have any association with the vaccine such as long term brain fog. The vaccines were found to have a high efficacy at reducing these types of symptomatic infections though.... More generally and unfortunately for the cranks, its noticeable that excess deaths and hospitalisation peaks follow COVID infection spikes, not the ramp up of vaccinations, and have declined considerably since the vaccination programmes began. It's almost like the professionals know better than someone who thinks influenza is a coronavirus...
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    1/1000 people are dead in the US. Much more in places like in India. And yet here we are people still underplaying it. It’s amazing seeing rewriting of history right in front of your eyes for sure.
    - realjhol 4y ago
      As I say, most of those are in extremely elderly or obese category.
      - parasubvert 4y ago
        This is a misunderstanding of how statistics work, and part of the lie that Covid is an old people and obese person’s problem. Not that you’re directly making this argument, but for posterity: It’s not just their problem. Unless you feel cardiology and oncology are also old and fat people’s problems, since they die more of cancer and heart disease? The extremely elderly and obese die of all causes disproportionately. But Covid lowers life expectancy and increases mortality of all age groups starting around age 30 even after all mitigating measures (vaccines, masks, etc) are taken in to account. The young lower their own life expectancy when they betray an inter-generational commitment to the older generations to take care of them. This won’t be the last pandemic, and the young won’t always be young.
        realjhol 4y ago
        We have no idea what the long term effects of COVID-19 infection will be, however there's no reason to think the long-term impact will be any different from any other coronavirus flu. And given that the virus is endemic, and the vaccines only provided fleeting protection (they're not even being offered by the NHS here in the UK any more), we'll all get it sooner or later. There's no choice about it. Fortunately for the vast majority of people, COVID-19 is a mild disease that they will recover from quickly.
        parasubvert 4y ago
        You have no idea what you’re talking about and are spreading misinformation. 1. SARS-CoV-2 is not influenza. 2. Influenza is not a coronavirus. 3. Influenza usually kills 300,000-500,000 people annually 4. Consensus estimates of excess deaths from COVID-19 are 14 million over the two years of 2020-2021. 2022 isn’t looking great either. 5. All developed countries highly recommend the annual Influenza vaccine even with its variable annual efficacy, as a way of lowering the intensity and spread. The same will likely continue in many countries for COVID-19, where the recent Bivalent vaccines show reduced but still significant effectiveness against the recent variants of SARS-CoV-2. 6. COVID-19 has raised all cause mortality and lowers life expectancy across all age groups starting before middle age. 7. The UK NHS continues to offer standard two dose and 3rd shot booster COVID-19 vaccines (all mRNA now) for children over aged 5 and adults. This has not stopped. Beyond this, they’ve limited additional boosters to seasonal programs for target populations that are at greater risk. They had one in the Autumn of 2022 and is staring a new one for Spring of 2023 for the immunocompromised and elderly (75+). The UK also signed a deal with Moderna to begin producing mRNA vaccines within the UK by 2025. The vast majority of the UK population have COVID antibodies and are at far less risk than they were in 2020, but this continues to be monitored and may require broader seasonal vaccination campaigns if immunity wanes. 8. As with any disease vector there always is a choice to use mitigations such as masks in crowded indoor spaces, vaccinations, etc. to lower the spread. This is something other countries learned decades ago.
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    It's kind of the opposite, the majority of deaths from covid were due to cytokine storm, which is your immune system working too well, and producing too many inflammatory cytokines.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  What’s your point? I literally said any pathogen that causes disease in us has to break our immune system first. Of course we need vaccines to help fight those disease.
- nick__m 4y ago
  A vaccine works by stimulating the immune system with a pathogen-like substance to produce a response that trains it. Ergo, if the immune system doesn't work, a vaccine is useless!
- krisoft 4y ago
  > Sometimes our immune systems don’t work though. In that case we need vaccines. Sorry, but that sounds a bit confused. Vaccines bring information to the immune system to train it to recognise something as a threat faster than it would otherwise. Think of it as a "wanted dead or alive" poster. The poster doesn't go out and kill the baddies on its own. The poster is distributed to the sheriffs of the towns, so if the baddie shows up they recognise it for what it is before the baddie robs the bank. In this parallel the baddies are the infectious material (virus, or bacteria), the sherrifs are the immune system, and the poster is the vaccine. If your immune system don't work, first of all that is very bad, second you don't need a vaccine. Because it won't help you! Same as sending wanted posters to a town with nobody who could act on them wouldn't make the town more secure.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    The problem comes if a mimic of the baddies gets attached to hostages e.g. spike proteins attached to heart muscle tissue. In this case, the immune system will attack the "baddies" causing harm to the heart muslcle tissue in the cross-fire. Heart muscle tissue never regenerates, hence the spike in Myocarditis cases.
    - Aardwolf 4y ago
      > Heart muscle tissue never regenerates Given the importance of the heart, that seems like a strange way that this has evolved, given that other tissue does regenerate
      - realjhol 4y ago
        Hard to fix a machine that can never ever go offline.
- originalcopying 4y ago
  [flagged]
groestl 4y ago
> it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect That sound's like it's giving some kind of agency to the pathogen ;) when in fact it's more like: everyone that's severly infected isolates or dies, so the more harmless variants of the pathogen can replicate faster.
- originalcopying 4y ago
  it's merely a different way to lay down the explanations. it's not "in fact" like you say; you merely provide an alternative way to understand what's going on and to describe it. it's incorrect to claim that either is wrong because of the other. in the end, we gotta learn to have multiple ways to explain the same things and it's best to shift between these 'theories' of what is going on as it serves our purposes. It's stupid to have this alternatives "fighting each other"; see? I just have agency to the ways to conceptualize, understand, and explain phenomena.
  - Silverback_VII 4y ago
    When it comes to viruses, I think it is important to understand that they simply replicate because they can. The virus has no interest in keeping you alive or killing you; it just infects cells and that’s it.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  It’s just an abstraction used to ease the conversation. If a disease is inclined to behave like X, that’s just a shortcut to say, “it’s evolutionarily advantageous if the mutations result in X behaviour.”
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  Prions are so hyper-intelligent that they've even hacked this "the host dying kills you too" problem.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Rabies is generally fatal and is not new or genetically novel, and like the article linked, is a CNS infection that travels the peripheral nervous system. First recorded case was 4000 years ago, suggesting it’s likely ancient through pre-history.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  AFAIK is also isn't super contagious, less opportunity for it to evolve
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    It’s super contagious in the reservoir species. But it’s not in humans. The point made above was about age if the pathogen not infectiousness.
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      But it isn't very lethal in that species, is it? In the species that it spreads rapidly in, it likely won't be very lethal which was the point
- echelon 4y ago
  How many humans get rabies per year versus how many that get influenza?
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    I’m not sure that’s relevant? I didn’t see anything stated about rates of infection. Absolutely if influenza were as fatal as rabies we would be extinct. But we also wouldn’t be posting on hacker news about it either. The statement was about longevity of the pathogen and fatality.
    - echelon 4y ago
      > Absolutely if influenza were as fatal as rabies we would be extinct. The chance that it would evolve to be as infectious would be greatly reduced. They teach this in first semester immunology.
jfowief 4y ago
> And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts. This isn't necessarily true. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-virulent/story?id=82052581 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-... How sad that chatgpt does a better job than most of the commenters here. >> ChatGPT: There are a few issues with this: The statement that "Any pathogen that currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses" is not entirely accurate. While many pathogens have evolved strategies to evade or suppress the immune system, not all pathogens rely on these mechanisms to cause disease. Some pathogens may cause disease by producing toxins, disrupting host tissues, or interfering with cellular processes, without necessarily having to evade the immune system. The claim that "pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales" is not necessarily true. While some pathogens that cause fatal diseases may be relatively new, others have been around for a long time and have co-evolved with their hosts. For example, malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite that has been infecting humans for millions of years. The statement that "it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect" is an oversimplification. While it is generally true that pathogens that kill their hosts too quickly may be less successful at spreading to new hosts, this is not always the case. Some pathogens may benefit from causing rapid, severe disease if it increases the likelihood of transmission to new hosts. The claim that "most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts" is also not entirely accurate. While it is possible for some pathogens to evolve to become less virulent over time, this is not a universal trend, and many pathogens may continue to cause severe disease for extended periods of time. Additionally, the evolution of a pathogen is influenced by a wide range of factors, including the host population, the environment, and the selective pressures imposed by the immune system.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  No single statement I made was absolute for a reason which is that exceptions exist, and while what gpt wrote is quite amazing you can see how you can’t trust it yet. I’m not communicating to an audience that’s well versed in immunology, but to one that’s new to it. Exposing them to some common ideas and thoughts of why biological systems are the way they are to give them better understanding without overloading them with the vagaries of biological variety. The reply from the bot sounds more like the smug 1st year graduate student sitting at the back of the lecture who thinks they’re smart because they made a technically correct counter point. Technically correct yes, but you won no fans here for sure.
somewhereoutth 4y ago
Pathogens will evolve to best survive and replicate - for fitness. If a pathogen kills a patient quickly before much chance of spread then yes they wouldn't be very fit and mutations delaying death would be beneficial. However this certainly does not imply that all pathogens evolve to become 'mild'. Killing the host (or permanently incapacitating them) is not necessarily incompatible with effective spread. Indeed, we have no strong evidence of a pathogen evolving to become milder. We do have lots of examples of hard won population immunity reducing the harmfulness of pathogens. Unfortunately it has become a bit of a 'natural is best' trope that viruses necessarily become weaker, but in fact nature will quite happily slaughter us, and it is our artificial interventions that keep us fit and healthy.
hoseja 4y ago
Except for anthrax, whose lifecycle explicitly includes killing its host and staying dormant in the soil where the host decomposes.

hammock 4y ago

Sometimes our immune systems don’t work though. In that case we need vaccines. Please don’t forget that

realjhol 4y ago
Sometimes, but other times e.g. COVID-19, our immune systems work extremely well in all except the very elderly and obese.
- hammock 4y ago
  I’m sorry you are a victim of deplorable disinformation. The vaccines actually prime our immune system to fight the infection, and Covid is killing children not just the elderly and body positive
  - MaxfordAndSons 4y ago
    Sorry this is ot, but I can't help but note: replacing "obese" with "body positive" is a wildly Orwellian linguistic move. They aren't remotely synonymous, nor do the groups they actually denote fully overlap (not all obese people are body positive, nor are all body positive people obese).
    - groestl 4y ago
      It's so over the top that it actually registered as cynism with me.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    The evidence is all out in the open now - there's really no hiding from it any more. In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know the risk of serious adverse effects was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 change of serious adverse effects: 22-Sep-22 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/ The UK government has now published its estimate of the number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a COIVD-19 hospitalisation: 25-Jan-2023 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1131409/appendix-1-of-jcvi-statement-on-2023-covid-19-vaccination-programme-8-november-2022.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... For example in the 20-29 year no-risk group, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one hopitalisation is 168,200. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate 706,500. Even in the at-risk group for 20-29 years, the numbers are 7500 and 59,500 respectively. In fact there was no group except for 70+ where the risk of hospitalisation (not severe requiring oxygen), came close to the risk associate with vaccine injury. It's for this reason, that these mRNA vaccines are no longer being offered by the NHS. Look - I'm sorry you were lied to, but at some point you've just go to hold your hands up and admit the truth of the matter. Edit: plenty of downvotes, but no refutation.
    - ramraj07 4y ago
      Here’s your refutation: many of these results confound pre omicron Covid with omicron Covid - the former was 10-100x deadlier, and totally warranted global mandating of the vaccines even with the published SAR rates. After omicron, it is absolutely true that the adverse reaction rate from mRNA vaccines might not be worth the benefit of avoiding the relatively less fatal omicron variant diseases for young individuals. I will agree that regulatory agencies and many pro vaccine arguments are doing a disservice by not being thorough about such distinctions. That doesn’t mean the choices made pre omicron were invalidated. The mRNA vaccines did a great job and did them in time to protect millions more lives from being lost.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      You're comparing apples with oranges. The majority of the serious adverse effects reported in the original trials the first paper rehashes (15.1 effects per 10000 above a 6.4 effect per 10000 placebo baseline with some people reporting multiple effects, after the authors stripped out SAE's where the placebo group reported worse outcomes...) did not involve hospitalisation, never mind intubation. And a significant proportion of COVID infections that do not require hospitalisation (i.e not counted in the NNV metric) nevertheless involve serious adverse effects including both those credibly associated with vaccine side effects but more commonly in symptomatic COVID patients (myocarditis) and those not thought to have any association with the vaccine such as long term brain fog. The vaccines were found to have a high efficacy at reducing these types of symptomatic infections though.... More generally and unfortunately for the cranks, its noticeable that excess deaths and hospitalisation peaks follow COVID infection spikes, not the ramp up of vaccinations, and have declined considerably since the vaccination programmes began. It's almost like the professionals know better than someone who thinks influenza is a coronavirus...
- ramraj07 4y ago
  1/1000 people are dead in the US. Much more in places like in India. And yet here we are people still underplaying it. It’s amazing seeing rewriting of history right in front of your eyes for sure.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    As I say, most of those are in extremely elderly or obese category.
    - parasubvert 4y ago
      This is a misunderstanding of how statistics work, and part of the lie that Covid is an old people and obese person’s problem. Not that you’re directly making this argument, but for posterity: It’s not just their problem. Unless you feel cardiology and oncology are also old and fat people’s problems, since they die more of cancer and heart disease? The extremely elderly and obese die of all causes disproportionately. But Covid lowers life expectancy and increases mortality of all age groups starting around age 30 even after all mitigating measures (vaccines, masks, etc) are taken in to account. The young lower their own life expectancy when they betray an inter-generational commitment to the older generations to take care of them. This won’t be the last pandemic, and the young won’t always be young.
      - realjhol 4y ago
        We have no idea what the long term effects of COVID-19 infection will be, however there's no reason to think the long-term impact will be any different from any other coronavirus flu. And given that the virus is endemic, and the vaccines only provided fleeting protection (they're not even being offered by the NHS here in the UK any more), we'll all get it sooner or later. There's no choice about it. Fortunately for the vast majority of people, COVID-19 is a mild disease that they will recover from quickly.
        parasubvert 4y ago
        You have no idea what you’re talking about and are spreading misinformation. 1. SARS-CoV-2 is not influenza. 2. Influenza is not a coronavirus. 3. Influenza usually kills 300,000-500,000 people annually 4. Consensus estimates of excess deaths from COVID-19 are 14 million over the two years of 2020-2021. 2022 isn’t looking great either. 5. All developed countries highly recommend the annual Influenza vaccine even with its variable annual efficacy, as a way of lowering the intensity and spread. The same will likely continue in many countries for COVID-19, where the recent Bivalent vaccines show reduced but still significant effectiveness against the recent variants of SARS-CoV-2. 6. COVID-19 has raised all cause mortality and lowers life expectancy across all age groups starting before middle age. 7. The UK NHS continues to offer standard two dose and 3rd shot booster COVID-19 vaccines (all mRNA now) for children over aged 5 and adults. This has not stopped. Beyond this, they’ve limited additional boosters to seasonal programs for target populations that are at greater risk. They had one in the Autumn of 2022 and is staring a new one for Spring of 2023 for the immunocompromised and elderly (75+). The UK also signed a deal with Moderna to begin producing mRNA vaccines within the UK by 2025. The vast majority of the UK population have COVID antibodies and are at far less risk than they were in 2020, but this continues to be monitored and may require broader seasonal vaccination campaigns if immunity wanes. 8. As with any disease vector there always is a choice to use mitigations such as masks in crowded indoor spaces, vaccinations, etc. to lower the spread. This is something other countries learned decades ago.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  It's kind of the opposite, the majority of deaths from covid were due to cytokine storm, which is your immune system working too well, and producing too many inflammatory cytokines.
ramraj07 4y ago
What’s your point? I literally said any pathogen that causes disease in us has to break our immune system first. Of course we need vaccines to help fight those disease.
nick__m 4y ago
A vaccine works by stimulating the immune system with a pathogen-like substance to produce a response that trains it. Ergo, if the immune system doesn't work, a vaccine is useless!
krisoft 4y ago
> Sometimes our immune systems don’t work though. In that case we need vaccines. Sorry, but that sounds a bit confused. Vaccines bring information to the immune system to train it to recognise something as a threat faster than it would otherwise. Think of it as a "wanted dead or alive" poster. The poster doesn't go out and kill the baddies on its own. The poster is distributed to the sheriffs of the towns, so if the baddie shows up they recognise it for what it is before the baddie robs the bank. In this parallel the baddies are the infectious material (virus, or bacteria), the sherrifs are the immune system, and the poster is the vaccine. If your immune system don't work, first of all that is very bad, second you don't need a vaccine. Because it won't help you! Same as sending wanted posters to a town with nobody who could act on them wouldn't make the town more secure.
- realjhol 4y ago
  The problem comes if a mimic of the baddies gets attached to hostages e.g. spike proteins attached to heart muscle tissue. In this case, the immune system will attack the "baddies" causing harm to the heart muslcle tissue in the cross-fire. Heart muscle tissue never regenerates, hence the spike in Myocarditis cases.
  - Aardwolf 4y ago
    > Heart muscle tissue never regenerates Given the importance of the heart, that seems like a strange way that this has evolved, given that other tissue does regenerate
    - realjhol 4y ago
      Hard to fix a machine that can never ever go offline.
originalcopying 4y ago
[flagged]

groestl 4y ago

> it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect That sound's like it's giving some kind of agency to the pathogen ;) when in fact it's more like: everyone that's severly infected isolates or dies, so the more harmless variants of the pathogen can replicate faster.

originalcopying 4y ago
it's merely a different way to lay down the explanations. it's not "in fact" like you say; you merely provide an alternative way to understand what's going on and to describe it. it's incorrect to claim that either is wrong because of the other. in the end, we gotta learn to have multiple ways to explain the same things and it's best to shift between these 'theories' of what is going on as it serves our purposes. It's stupid to have this alternatives "fighting each other"; see? I just have agency to the ways to conceptualize, understand, and explain phenomena.
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  When it comes to viruses, I think it is important to understand that they simply replicate because they can. The virus has no interest in keeping you alive or killing you; it just infects cells and that’s it.
Waterluvian 4y ago
It’s just an abstraction used to ease the conversation. If a disease is inclined to behave like X, that’s just a shortcut to say, “it’s evolutionarily advantageous if the mutations result in X behaviour.”
kyleyeats 4y ago
Prions are so hyper-intelligent that they've even hacked this "the host dying kills you too" problem.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Rabies is generally fatal and is not new or genetically novel, and like the article linked, is a CNS infection that travels the peripheral nervous system. First recorded case was 4000 years ago, suggesting it’s likely ancient through pre-history.

kevviiinn 4y ago
AFAIK is also isn't super contagious, less opportunity for it to evolve
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  It’s super contagious in the reservoir species. But it’s not in humans. The point made above was about age if the pathogen not infectiousness.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    But it isn't very lethal in that species, is it? In the species that it spreads rapidly in, it likely won't be very lethal which was the point
echelon 4y ago
How many humans get rabies per year versus how many that get influenza?
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I’m not sure that’s relevant? I didn’t see anything stated about rates of infection. Absolutely if influenza were as fatal as rabies we would be extinct. But we also wouldn’t be posting on hacker news about it either. The statement was about longevity of the pathogen and fatality.
  - echelon 4y ago
    > Absolutely if influenza were as fatal as rabies we would be extinct. The chance that it would evolve to be as infectious would be greatly reduced. They teach this in first semester immunology.

jfowief 4y ago

> And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts. This isn't necessarily true. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-virulent/story?id=82052581 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-... How sad that chatgpt does a better job than most of the commenters here. >> ChatGPT: There are a few issues with this: The statement that "Any pathogen that currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses" is not entirely accurate. While many pathogens have evolved strategies to evade or suppress the immune system, not all pathogens rely on these mechanisms to cause disease. Some pathogens may cause disease by producing toxins, disrupting host tissues, or interfering with cellular processes, without necessarily having to evade the immune system. The claim that "pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales" is not necessarily true. While some pathogens that cause fatal diseases may be relatively new, others have been around for a long time and have co-evolved with their hosts. For example, malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite that has been infecting humans for millions of years. The statement that "it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect" is an oversimplification. While it is generally true that pathogens that kill their hosts too quickly may be less successful at spreading to new hosts, this is not always the case. Some pathogens may benefit from causing rapid, severe disease if it increases the likelihood of transmission to new hosts. The claim that "most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts" is also not entirely accurate. While it is possible for some pathogens to evolve to become less virulent over time, this is not a universal trend, and many pathogens may continue to cause severe disease for extended periods of time. Additionally, the evolution of a pathogen is influenced by a wide range of factors, including the host population, the environment, and the selective pressures imposed by the immune system.

ramraj07 4y ago
No single statement I made was absolute for a reason which is that exceptions exist, and while what gpt wrote is quite amazing you can see how you can’t trust it yet. I’m not communicating to an audience that’s well versed in immunology, but to one that’s new to it. Exposing them to some common ideas and thoughts of why biological systems are the way they are to give them better understanding without overloading them with the vagaries of biological variety. The reply from the bot sounds more like the smug 1st year graduate student sitting at the back of the lecture who thinks they’re smart because they made a technically correct counter point. Technically correct yes, but you won no fans here for sure.

somewhereoutth 4y ago

Pathogens will evolve to best survive and replicate - for fitness. If a pathogen kills a patient quickly before much chance of spread then yes they wouldn't be very fit and mutations delaying death would be beneficial. However this certainly does not imply that all pathogens evolve to become 'mild'. Killing the host (or permanently incapacitating them) is not necessarily incompatible with effective spread. Indeed, we have no strong evidence of a pathogen evolving to become milder. We do have lots of examples of hard won population immunity reducing the harmfulness of pathogens. Unfortunately it has become a bit of a 'natural is best' trope that viruses necessarily become weaker, but in fact nature will quite happily slaughter us, and it is our artificial interventions that keep us fit and healthy.

hoseja 4y ago

Except for anthrax, whose lifecycle explicitly includes killing its host and staying dormant in the soil where the host decomposes.