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Posted by sohkamyung 6 hours ago

A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading(www.sciencenews.org)
157 points | 114 commentspage 2
mghackerlady 5 hours ago|
>infect cats

No! We must stop this at all costs

>and people

Eh, all right then. If it takes the cats out at least we'd be going with them

senectus1 4 hours ago||
can fungals go pandemic?
rimworld 5 hours ago||
[flagged]
moinism 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
edonhametsu 2 hours ago|
What does this add to the conversation? It's hardly a summary, and not to be too judgy but seems like a third-grader's PowerPoint - just showing images that reflect exactly what it's telling me (both in audio and in text).
swader999 6 hours ago||
We need lock downs, a wall, 100% containment. Full vaccine mobilization. Starship must be expedited. A world without cats is not a world at all.
croes 5 hours ago||
A world with cats is a world with billions of dead birds and small mammals.

Without them we will have even more insects.

So this time cats won’t protect us from diseases by killing the carrier, these time they help the carriers

throwaway173738 5 hours ago|||
Or killing them in the US will allow bird populations to recover, leading to birds killing more insects. Cats are not native to the Americas.
nosioptar 1 hour ago|||
Humans aren't native to the Americas either.
esseph 4 hours ago|||
Cats are very native to the Americas.

Just not housecats.

hsbauauvhabzb 5 hours ago||||
Wouldn’t we have less insects because of increased bird, rodent and spider growth?
zeristor 5 hours ago|||
Less insecticide is probably the key thing.

Driving in the eighties with windscreens full of insects, and now hardly anything, and a lot less of the things that lived on them.

themaninthedark 5 hours ago||
Sometimes I wonder about that. The measure is number of insect impacts on windshields but is the car the same?

If we use a more modern care would the increased aerodynamics prevent impacts as instead of punching through the air you are cutting through it?

Have never read the full experimental setup and assumptions... I do know that I have less dead bug then when I was a kid...

ai_ 4 hours ago|||
Ever since I started riding a motorcycle I've started to believe this to be the case too. I get so many bug splats on my helmet, jacket, and motorcycle that I'd never have if I was driving a car. By the end of most rides out in the country on the highway I'm covered in splats.
diegolas 4 hours ago|||
i've noted less bugs on the windshield but about the same on the optics and the radiator screen, so i go with the aerodynamics explanation as well. bugs are there because i see the bug swarms around the road too.
croes 5 hours ago|||
"Them" refers to birds and small mammals and "even more" refers to the consequences of climate change where insects have more habitable areas.
mb_thd 5 hours ago|||
They still kill carriers for other stuff. Pick your poison, I guess.
aa-jv 5 hours ago||
Pets are slaves. Stop trying to own emotions.
tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago|||
Dogs have owners, cats have staff.
SJC_Hacker 5 hours ago||||
More like cats enslaved humans
nosioptar 1 hour ago||
My cats prefer to say they domesticated the damn dirty apes, enslavement makes it sound too much like we deserve the same freedoms as the cats.
Guthwine 5 hours ago|||
Genuinely curious - are sheep kept for their wool also slaves in your opinion?
voakbasda 4 hours ago||
There is a ballot measure this Fall in Oregon that would ban pet and livestock ownership in the state. The backers got over 100,000 people to sign the petition.

There are people that either simply do not understand the natural order that the majority of humans want to eat meat and keep pets, or they do not care about other people enough to respect their lifestyle choices.

dguest 2 hours ago||
Citation:

- https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Criminalize_Hunting,_Fishing,...

- https://www.yesonip28.org/

happyopossum 4 hours ago||
So a disease that has killed 11,000 people in a country with a population of >200 million over 30 years is a ‘ginormous outbreak’?

This kind of hyper-scary overreaction from the CDC official being quoted and other government agents is a big cause of the current loss of trust in those institutions.

A few years ago monkeypox was gonna kill all of us and our dogs, I get “extreme heat” and “severe weather” warnings for days where the weather is 20* below the annual peak in my home town, and now a fungus is going to kill me and my cats.

Ok boomer - just stop worrying please?

drdexebtjl 4 hours ago|
Infected 11,000, not killed.

From what I can tell, deaths are in the dozens (over 30 years).

I’m worried about the cats, though.

aardvark92 3 hours ago||
If it had killed 11,000 people we’d be hearing much more about it. It made news that Ebola hit a record high of 1,000 cases this week.
dosisking 6 hours ago||
It's hard to take an article that uses the word 'ginormous' seriously
helsinkiandrew 5 hours ago||
I think quoting is fine, but it's surprising coming from a senior adviser at a U.S. Government department.

> “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

alpinisme 5 hours ago|||
The article doesn’t. It quotes a CDC advisor who does.
doodlebugging 5 hours ago|||
I agree even though I use ginormous in normal conversation. In the right context it is fine, I just don't think this is the right context.

I also find it hard to take an article seriously when its volume comparison employs "Olympic-sized swimming pools". I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership, which I hope they measure realistically under the assumption that the number of readers will always be close to half the number of eyeballs on the page. Otherwise they would be inflating readership and that would be misleading.

esseph 4 hours ago||
> I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership

At least in the US, "Olympic sized swimming pool" is as common a unit of measure as a US football field - very commonly used.

doodlebugging 3 hours ago||
I agree. It is common to see those used as area and volume examples. I think it is far less common for the audience to have a clear mental picture of the two terms though. It's easier for a football field to serve as a reference because more people have exposure to football fields. It is more difficult for an Olympic sized swimming pool to serve as a reference because there are fewer people who have seen one in person.

I think it is a bit comical to use swimming pools as a volumetric reference when most people's experience with swimming pools has been in a back yard setting or on visits to community pools, which may be any convenient size.

esseph 1 hour ago||
> I think it is a bit comical to use swimming pools as a volumetric reference when most people's experience with swimming pools has been in a back yard setting or on visits to community pools, which may be any convenient size.

A lot of US high schools and US colleges have Olympic pools.

doodlebugging 9 minutes ago||
>A lot of US high schools and US colleges have Olympic pools.

Especially for high schools it's also true that a lot of them don't. In the case of high schools I think an Olympic sized swimming pool is likely in mid to large cities or there may be one available locally. Swim teams at high school level are probably city school features instead of rural school features. I think there are more rural high schools than city high schools.

I don't know though.

Colleges. Hmmm. I suspect that all state colleges have pools. I am not sure about smaller colleges though. That's an interesting question. I'm sure the data is out there though.

LargeWu 5 hours ago|||
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
abanana 5 hours ago|||
It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.
bandofthehawk 5 hours ago||
Technical jargon like "gigantic" or "enormous"?
sambeau 4 hours ago||
Here in Scotland, 'ginormous' is normal, possibly more regularly used than 'enormous' or 'giant'.
everdrive 6 hours ago|
Everything is spreading. We're a large interconnected world, and we'll inherit everyone's problems eventually. There are better alternatives, but it's not something people will seriously consider.
andreime 6 hours ago||
Please name a better alternative, I'm very curious.
symian 6 hours ago|||
A system that prices in cost of negative externalities is better than what we have now. A system that caps how much wealth a person can have is a better system that what we now have. A system that prevents the exportation of pollution is a better system than what we have now.

These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.

everdrive 5 hours ago|||
One where people don't travel very much.
happytoexplain 6 hours ago|||
Don't be ominous. Just say things or refrain from posting.
elzbardico 5 hours ago|||
Do you live in the American continent? Look at the skin tone of most people you find in the streets. Go to a library and try to find out what was the average skin tone in your region 600 years ago. Compare both.

Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has always been a part of our civilization.

mc32 6 hours ago|||
What are the alternatives people rather avoid considering?
rob74 6 hours ago|||
Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.
hagbard_c 5 hours ago|||
You first?

Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.

symian 5 hours ago|||
We are in the midst of a great extinction event. It’s the only extinction event caused by one species. We are quite bad for the planet’s ecosystem and things like factory farming of cows and pigs cause great suffering. Having far fewer humans on the planet would be a great benefit to other species and to humanity.
N_Lens 4 hours ago||
Dont worry! With AI powered robotics it’ll only take a tiny fraction of humans to create many times more ‘impact’!
rob74 5 hours ago|||
Sorry if that wasn't obvious, I wasn't proposing it, I just wanted to come up with an example of a solution that "no one would seriously consider".
elzbardico 5 hours ago|||
There's no such thing as introducing species where they don't belong. Ecosystem are dynamic, several other animals serve as vectors for transporting species from a place to another. There's no such thing as a long term static equilibria where godess gaia looks like a Jehova's witnesses book illustration. This is an incredibly cultish and misanthropic position.
soiltype 2 hours ago||
This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.
rvba 6 hours ago|||
Probably something about walls or methods used by political systems that built walls.
shahsjsjjsz 6 hours ago||
Not having cats is an option that is not seriously considered.

Dogs are even worse. Make them shit in your own backyard please.

If you are a city dweller please do not keep “pets”, it’s bloody ridiculous, thank you.

nemomarx 6 hours ago|||
We've been keeping pets as a species for considerably longer than we've had cities. It's basically an ingrained part of how we react to animals now.
wafflemaker 4 hours ago|||
In dwarf fortress you can have dragons as pets. Never got there, tho I think I will train dogs in my current fortress.
manarth 4 hours ago||
Sadly not known to breathe fire, but on the plus side, less likely to burn your house down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogona
lenerdenator 5 hours ago|||
Beyond that, longer than we've had the written word.

Domestication of animals might be the single greatest achievement of humans.

soiltype 2 hours ago||
Aren't cities older than writing?
pizzafeelsright 2 hours ago||||
Keeping an animal that defecates indoors and allowing it contact with food prep area is obscene.
nosioptar 1 hour ago|||
I defecate indoors. Should I not be allowed bear food prep areas?
soiltype 2 hours ago||||
Obscene is the right word because it's quite manageable in health terms, it just feels bad to you.
542354234235 35 minutes ago|||
Children?
andrew_lettuce 5 hours ago||||
You seem to think humans keep cats as pets, which indicates you've never lived with a cat before.
nosioptar 4 hours ago||
Cats have standards that prevent that person from getting hired as a servant.
whatevaa 6 hours ago|||
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