3 ms·

These kinds of articles are useless if they don't give any indication of the severity of the given effect on the whole (I don't know if they mention since it's

These kinds of articles are useless if they don't give any indication of the severity of the given effect on the whole (I don't know if they mention since it's paywalled) Is environmental change contributing 2%, 20% or 200% more to infection rates? Does something else like the state of total unhealthiness in a major portion of the population completely dwarf this effect? Would this effect be completely moot if we weren't so massively networked across the globe? As a standalone metric, it's completely void of meaning and potentially only newsworthy because it contains a politically hot topic (climate change)

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
From the top of my mind: just lyme disease by ticks alone is spreading. Also that thing called 'valley fever' caused by some spores from fungi and blown by the wind. Maybe even the plague, which still is endemic in some parts of the world. Not that far away, actually. From the southwestern US down to Mexico f.e. Also 'Zika'...
DoctorOetker 2y ago
I don't understand this type of skepticism, in the absence of indications to the contrary I would expect the claim for the article to be true: environmental change means changes in niche for both micro and macro organisms. So natural selection pressure will optimize towards a new nearby optimum. Compared to macro organisms, micro organisms have shorter life cycles (so more generations per unit of time) and higher body counts (the number of elephants must necessarily be dwarfed by the number of bacteria, since a single elephant will have numerous bacteria on its skin alone...) So micro organisms are buying natural selection lottery tickets both in bigger bulk as well as at higher frequency compared to macro organisms. Normally thats not a problem, since both micro and macro organisms were effectively equilibrated to a long-term relatively stable niche, so it didn't matter that micro-organisms and macro-organisms converged to their respective optima at different rates, since they were already near optimum. That difference in convergence rate will become clear as the optimum shifts location.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

From the top of my mind: just lyme disease by ticks alone is spreading. Also that thing called 'valley fever' caused by some spores from fungi and blown by the wind. Maybe even the plague, which still is endemic in some parts of the world. Not that far away, actually. From the southwestern US down to Mexico f.e. Also 'Zika'...

DoctorOetker 2y ago

I don't understand this type of skepticism, in the absence of indications to the contrary I would expect the claim for the article to be true: environmental change means changes in niche for both micro and macro organisms. So natural selection pressure will optimize towards a new nearby optimum. Compared to macro organisms, micro organisms have shorter life cycles (so more generations per unit of time) and higher body counts (the number of elephants must necessarily be dwarfed by the number of bacteria, since a single elephant will have numerous bacteria on its skin alone...) So micro organisms are buying natural selection lottery tickets both in bigger bulk as well as at higher frequency compared to macro organisms. Normally thats not a problem, since both micro and macro organisms were effectively equilibrated to a long-term relatively stable niche, so it didn't matter that micro-organisms and macro-organisms converged to their respective optima at different rates, since they were already near optimum. That difference in convergence rate will become clear as the optimum shifts location.