Posted by bookofjoe 2 days ago
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
Pardon probably stupid question, yet i'm wondering why (under local or general anesthesia of course) it isn't possible to "drain snake" the remainder of the worm and to clean/disinfect the worm channel that way. After all we insert similar flexible stuff into blood vessels from say thigh all the way up to the heart.
>the worm sits winding through subcutaneous connective tissue. It doesn't create a neat tunnel — it's loosely embedded and adhered to surrounding tissue along its length.
that's bad. In my thinking i in particular missed that it may be winding instead of being more streamlined like say blood vessels/etc. Stuff of nightmares. Now i imagined a one winding in the grooves of the brain ...
I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply: "And a good human dewormer too!"
And that may be responsible for some false positives in ivermectin studies for COVID - if a patient has a parasitic infection as well as COVID, treating the parasites will improve their outcome.
Is it dangerous?
Yeah I don’t like news that does that, as opposed to giving the best information.
Saying that something might be "finally something" that ivermectin can help with would have been embarrassing.
It would have been especially embarrassing because the link you gave gives two things ivermectin helps with. After concluding that ivermectin did not affect the guinea worms it says:
> No adverse reaction to treatment was seen. It appears that ivermectin can be used safely as mass chemotherapy against onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis in areas where guinea-worm is also endemic.
They are saying that if a patient has onchocerciasis or lymphatic filariasis it is safe to use go ahead and use ivermectin (which is the normal treatment for those) to treat those, even if the patient has guinea worms.
So good thing you didn't say it!
From https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-ivermectin
> It acts most strongly on glutamate-gated chloride channels, which vertebrates don't even have.
They are like little holes in the wall of the cell of worms that can be opened and closed, and ivermectin locks them in the open position. A much better and more technical explanation https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/191
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
An example:
https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introdu...
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?
So yes in a sense it is free market.
Especially disease eradication is beating nature in macrobiology and philantropic foundations are the optimal tool to do that.
Also, your drop of it betrays a pretty fundamental lack of understanding. I stand by my statement that free market could never accomplish something like this. Eradicating a disease is nothing like a business making a pencil to sell.
Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Emphasis on might.
Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.
Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
They sure have a pretty dim view of their fellow humans while paradoxically believing in the goodness of the gubberment.
One tiny correction to your post. While it's true that most income tax is in the region of 30%, the cumulative taxes would be of the order of 60% of what of what one could potentially earn. Cumulative taxes = income + payroll+ property taxes etc.
I’d prefer not to rely on them.
Many, many fewer than you assume.
Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.
[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
Similarly, SARS-COV-2 is a virus which causes Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes AIDS.
People often conflate parasites or viruses with the diseases they cause, and it's practically impossible to eliminate the diseases without eliminating the causative agent, but they are technically distinct concepts.
I think technically you get a parasite and then it causes a disease in reaction, but if it's a parasite you can spread it's basically fine to model it / talk about eradicating it in the same way right?
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.
That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.
The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.
* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.