3 ms·
There are two factors now which make things different: 1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher
by vecter 4y ago
There are two factors now which make things different:
1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher now than it was during cave-man days. With crowded cities, public transit, and air travel, pandemic-level diseases can spread across the world in a matter of days or weeks.
2. Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. We are, in a sense, selectively breeding pathogens that are both good at infecting humans and resistant to our treatments. That is a focused selective pressure that has never existed before, and may pose the biggest threat to us in the next 50-100 years. For a concrete example, look at this experiment which shows how quickly bacteria can evolve to overcome levels of antibiotics that are orders of magnitude more than we would ever give a human [0].
Yes, there will generally always be some subset of the human population that is resistant to any particular disease, but our measure of success is not "5% of humans will survive the next pandemic, so we're all good, let's it move along nothing to see here." If we start to regularly have drug-resistant pathogens that make hospital stays very dangerous for patients (imagine having a 1/3 or even 1/10 chance of dying at a hospital due to an infection entirely irrelevant to your condition) or just more common COVID-level pandemics, that would be a serious disruption to humanity, significantly increase general mortality rates across the board, and drastically change life as we know it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M
- moremetadata 4y ago[dead]
- bawolff 4y ago> Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. I don't think that makes sense when comparing against the threat level of pre-antimicrobial times. It didn't matter that they weren't resistant before we had antimicrobial drugs. Lack of resistence was useless in cave man times.
- iknowstuff 4y agoI’m upset you’re quick to blame density and public transit but won’t even mention the risk of animal meat consumption, which is responsible for what, all the pandemics we’ve had?
- abakker 4y agoI do not think the animal meat consumption is the reason? Animal origin, not animal meat vector. This isn't a debate about veganism and moralism.
- iknowstuff 4y agoNobody said anything veganism nor moralism except for you. (Almost?) all pandemics were zoonotic. We have reduced the amount of species we keep in our cities but we still have meat markets where they are kept alive until they’re butchered for freshness. Like in Wuhan. > As we increase our interactions with animals through hunting, the trading of animal foods, animal husbandry practices, wet markets, and the domestication of animals or exotic pets, the probability of cross-species transmission dramatically increases. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874076/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874076/ Regardless of morals, the more animals we kill, the more pandemics we’re going to have.
- klyrs 4y agoOnly, in this case, it might be plant consumption... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9239177/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9239177/
- vecter 4y agoMy list was not meant to be comprehensive, but that's what I meant by "our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.)." That includes heavy antibiotic use in farming which also likely contributes to antibiotic resistance.
- TylerE 4y agoThe Bubonic Plague was transmitted by flea bites.