Posted by Bender 3 hours ago
I had measles as a child, too. Fortunately, my parents are doctors and I was well cared for and nature was good to me as well. So here I am, pretty much fine. I’d rather have not had the disease, all things told. Incredibly contagious disease. I was in the room with the other sick child for only a few moments.
Yes. They mean that measles "erases immune memory, taking away antibodies to recently exposed diseases.".
The grandparent was discussing their measles experience and the parent was responding to that.
So yeah I’m sure evolution didn’t create something perfect in the disease here but it survives long enough, and kills few-enough people slowly enough in the wild to survive
Generally it's more advantageous for your own anatomy not to kill you without intervention, but they reproduce and that checks off the "good enough" box.
Consider that measles in itself comes originally from a animal but a mutation found itself be able to spread to humans. That, in and of itself, is the process of evolution.
So while it is not necessarily a useful lens to try to interpret a moment in time as many unknown factors are at play (for example the same gene that is important for mortality might also impact survival in certain environments, and therefore how contagious it could be), if we were to understand it’s history of every mutation that came and went, the environments it lived in, evolution theory would explain why the path looked like it did. And subsequently why it is like it is today.
1. We might not be the only hosts or place where it can survive. Measles seems to have mutated from a cattle virus.
2. Killing the host might be the virus' end-game, in which case it evolved to extinction. Mutations nor evolution don't have a goal. There's not always an advantage. I bet most changes aren't advantageous.
3. If you really want to see everything in terms of evolutionary change, the virus could even been seen as a tool in human evolution.
Evolution is a way to look at changes in and forces operating on living things. It is a property that emerges for human observers. Nature doesn't care about it.
Short term intense disease courses tend to only work for a short period of evolution for new infection mechanisms, the intensity makes them sensitive to any increased immunity which ends up halting the spread for more mild versions. Infectious diseases tend to lower in intensity over the long term.
First of all, this is scary. Secondly, I wonder if it hase the same effect on autoimmune disease?
"Once the measles virus contacts the mucosa lining the respiratory tract, it binds to SLAM (signaling lymphocyte activation molecule, also known as CD150) on the surface of macrophages and dendritic cells. These cells then take up the virus... These immune cells pass the virus on to other groups of immune cells, including B cells, T cells, thymocytes, and hematopoietic stem cells, which disseminate the virus to other organs during the incubation period.
"Immune amnesia
"The measles virus can deplete previously acquired immune memory by killing cells that make antibodies, and thus weakens the immune system, which can cause deaths from other diseases. Suppression of the immune system by measles lasts about two years and has been epidemiologically implicated in an increase in childhood mortality from other infectious diseases during this period. The measles vaccine contains an attenuated strain of the virus which does not deplete immune memory."
* Type 1 diabetes
* Multiple sclerosis
* Rheumatoid arthritis
That said, you become far more likely to end up sick with a whole bunch of other stuff, which can then eliminate any benefits for the autoimmune disorders.
Oh, and there’s also a chance it will give you an autoimmune disorder.
Absolute bastard, if you ask me.
We are forgetting the lessons of WWII, and the world is now stocked with thousands of nuclear weapons each hundreds of times more powerful than Hiroshima.
I don’t think we as a civilization can afford this kind of amnesiac adaptation anymore.
There's a saying that people get more conservative as they age. But the Greatest Generation, those that experienced the 30's and WW2 tended in the opposite direction, voting more left as they aged.
No, the article is a shitshow.
Ben Dowse is an MD, not a pediatric nurse.
The family ended up accepting the antibody treatment before leaving the hospital. The Daily Mail article bizarrely implies that they never accepted the treatment.
Both journalistic mistakes are clear from reading the beginning of the Wired article linked in the error-laden Daily Mail article.
Did you notice these errors?
Thanks for contradicting.
I do think it's interesting that herd immunity is failing, but the linked piece itself is not very good, agreed. Amending now to make it clear I don't think it's that the article is interesting.
If these ailments are completely abstract in both their scope and personal effects, it's easier to be convinced by emotional manipulators. Especially if you're part of the... let's say low empathy population.
This is the end result of decades snake oil moguls empowered by orin hatch and then turbo charged by people being furious that they weren't allowed to go to TGI Fridays for six months.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20240218010527/https://www.fas.u...
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
What did Hatch do (I mostly know him as the paid servant of the copyright industry)?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbAN...
Right now it’s dealing with second generation propaganda where much of the leadership believes the narrative rather than the underlying justification for that narrative. This is mitigating by the older generation retaining a great deal of power, but it creates some IMO really interesting dynamics.
Straw man. Nobody claimed this. Just that the factor identified, politics by attention economics as a result of social media, is not unique to the alt right.
My point was there’s an internal disconnect inside the alt right movement which makes this play out in very distinct ways. Dig into say China’s political to social media connections for some wildly different dynamics.
> is not unique to the alt right
Sure, that I can agree with but it’s a long way from your earlier blanket statement.
China regulates social media in a way we don’t. The fundamental dynamic doesn’t apply there.
First past the post vs representative representation create some really interesting points of divergence.
Federally? Not really.
> UK, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil are all interesting because of just how different yet similar a role social media plays in politics
Could you expand on this?
TikTok is just one of many examples where the federal government has played a significant role. I mean you can debate about how relevant terrorism, CSAM, etc are here, but lots of debatably minor changes still add up.
> Could you expand on this?
It’s a lot to try and summarize in a comment, but just as an example. UK elections can take place early when a coalition breaks up this places a lot more power in the hands of voters and thus social media mid cycle. In the US passing unpopular legislation early means it’s less likely to be remembered next election cycle.
This is a playbook that was utilised by the alt-right first, and adopted by nearly everyone else; particularly (though not exclusively) Republicans in the US, followed by most conservative organizations around the world.
Disclaimer: I am an internet rando -- talk to your doctor.
Having trouble parsing this one.
I'm old enough to have lived with Y2K. It's not really talked about much nowadays and I suspect a good number of people don't even know about it but leading up to 2000, everybody knew about it. By 1998 it was something you'd see on the news. Anyway, a ton of work went into eliminating Y2K issues and when 2000 happened, everything kinda kept on working.
Lots of people looked at that and unironically said that Y2K was a hoax. I actually wonder if this was a significant contribution to the distrust in authority that contributed to the rise of anti-vaxxers. To be fair, that did start before 2000. The disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield blew up in the late 1990s over the UK's triple jab and his effort to sell an alternative, which failed.
Polio (effedtively eliminated in most countries), smallpox, measles, Guinea worm (due for elimination in the coming years), etc didn't disappear on their own. Australia is on track to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035 due to the widespread adoption of the HPV vaccine [3].
Sometimes it's hard not to feel like we live on the dumbest timeline.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
[2]: https://www.kff.org/other-health/measles-elimination-status-...
[3]: https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-rebecca-white-mp...
You're committing a fallacy of equivocation. "Y2K" has two distinct meanings:
1. A software bug related to date handling that could cause incorrect behavior that was unpredictable in the specifics but bounded in the kind and extent of damage it could cause.
2. A software bug that could cause the collapse of society.
You might or might not remember this, but prior to the turn of the millennium there were plenty of people regularly talking about Y2K using the latter meaning. When people say that Y2K was a hoax, they're saying that the second meaning was not something that was ever within the realm of possibility, not that Y2K would not have caused any problems whatsoever.
I suspect a lot of "vaccine skepticism" is just an expression of such needle phobia.
Maybe developing more needle free vaccine delivery mechanisms would solve a lot of this problem. I have much doubt about arguing people out of phobias.
This time series suggests, however, that Marin has handed the torch to its MAGA neighbors. https://vax.edsource.org/school?schoolCode=6988448&schoolNam...
They died, Kayleigh. There were just 9 other siblings to see who survived