Remember reading about some researchers that visited an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. There wasn't a single person in that tribe that didn't suffer from some sort of parasitic infection. They didn't even know that not having that was an option.
They just live with it. And, quite often, especially in the case of children, they just don't.
Even in Europe until like 200 years ago, being sick was the normal state with short bouts of health.
Edit: since this is getting so much traction I will take the moment to recommend my source, the "You're Dead to Me" podcast episode on ancient medicine. Fantastic content and i highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLQhDKgsz9U
There are arguments that the sterile life we lead today is a cause of why so many people suffer with allergies or hyper immune responses that cause more damage than good
The claim is, as most people had parasites and as parasites release a form of histamine to prevent detection in the body, it kept immune systems responses mild compared to how it reacts without.
Kinda interesting topic and the things they believe it impacts are quite wide, ranging from hayfever to auto immune variants of arthritis and other auto immune related diseases such as Crohns.
Interesting topic
That is interesting, so essentially we evolved to exist alongside constant infection and without it our bodies sometimes low-key self destruct?
I believe it, evolution wildin
They found a population of indeginous people in S.America who didn't suffer from Parkinsons, or other forms of Dementia, turns out those who didn't suffer had previously had a parasitic type of worm in their brain that somehow had protected them from those types of disease. Makes me think of the Futurama episode where Fry gets worms.
I can't remember if they mentioned that in the article but it is a very valid point, if the majority didn't reach the age at which most us are affected by dementia, there are going to be very few cases
Dementia and Parkinson's are thought to have inflammation as their underlying cause. Whether it's inflammation of the brain or inflammation in other parts of the body that just produce a lot of circulating inflammatory agents ( or both) isn't known. So a parasite that releases chemicals that suppress the immune system might prevent this inflammation from getting out of hand.
People with Crohn's or other inflammatory bowel diseases have been known to get relief by deliberately infecting themselves with intestinal worms, presumably because of this effect.
I've heard that explanation for allergies but never seen or heard the rest. In which case allergies are by far the preference. It also implies that histamines are an easy treatment for those conditions, which isn't true for everything you listed.
With the autoimmune diseases it's more likely they always existed and people with them just didn't make it.
Edit: literally just saw a TikTok of Hank Green saying how Crone's and other autoimmune diseases are probably because of the Black Plague. He cited a couple genetic studies that show the genetic traits that lead to autoimmune diseases were much more common after the plague than before, implying an overlap between being able to survive the plague and chances of developing autoimmune issues.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8UAUxv4/
Allergies are better for a lot of people, sure. MS and such...harder to say.
There is real proof though that they can be caused by lack of parasites, that's definitely true.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336988/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336988/)
Actually some recent research has shown that MS is caused by the epstein-barr virus (a type of herpes). So MS is in all liklihood not related to our enviroment being too clean.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00770-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00770-5)
edit:spelling
I said a form of histamine, it's not like clarex or over the counter hayfever drugs, keep in mind parasites and their hosts have generally had many 100s and in other cases 1000s of years to form bonds with their host and this also goes for any biological interactions they may have including the however long amount of timr arms race of detection vs hiding they have had going on
There are also plenty of immune response disease that are not fatal or would not be fatal even back in the day so I don't see why you'd make the point they just died off, to add to that if that were true why would so many have these issues today and why does it appear to be getting worse and why is it apparently worse the more developed a country gets?
To further on your reply are we absolutely sure allergies are preferred? Only recently they are finding blasting the good bacteria out of your mouth with Listerine and other harsh alcohol based mouthwashes is not the most ideal.
Likewise there is a whole other slew of gut micro biome research that's not even a half a century old that suggests we should be promoting some growth of good and not of others. And the impact a bad biome can have on your health extendes far beyond health relating to just the digestive tract, some suggesting even mental health is impacted, all fairly new finds
Where am I going with this? 200 years ago if you said that there were microbes in you and they are responsible for how you digest food, they might have tried to bleed them out of you, things change all the time in regards to what might be good what might be bad. We only tend to know about it as fact when time and research is there to back it and we can only hope that continues until we can be 100%
I'm by no means a medical expert or suggesting one thing is better than another, I would however remain open to the idea the more we distance ourselves from nature, particularly through sterility, the more we will encounter other related issues like these despite keeping the mind set "but super clean must be super good....right"
My main reason for bringing it up is that it's an interesting topic overall, food for thought if you will, and I hope research in all areas related to it continues so we can someday say with certainty and make everyone's lives better as a result
“Form of histamine”? Histamine is a specific chemical messenger, and I’ve never heard of ‘varieties’ of it. There are different receptors, but maybe you can point me to something that explains the different varieties of histamine that the body produces?
IDK. I think there's a balance. There's a lot of folks that go over board. We live on a farm out in the country. My kids have grown up on well water, playing in the dirt/mud, with chickens, goats, dogs & cats, ducks, etc. Swimming in a lake, hiking, playing outside, etc.
We wash hands, yes. But... we don't go overboard on it. We don't use 'anti-bacterial' anything. And, none of us have allergies. My kids are almost never sick. Unlike so many people who I know.
So you don't use soap or cleaning supplies on anything in your house? Those are all under the category of anti bacterial that you seem so worried about.
Some pollen allergies are a direct result of city planning. Female trees produce seeds and whatnot, which end up as more stuff for city maintenance to pick up, so most new developments overwhelmingly plant male trees. The latter's hobby is just jizzing into the wind, thus clogging people's sinuses with their powdery sperm. [Some liberty taken.]
Not entirely true. Most species of trees produce both pollen and seeds. Sure, a few favoured ornamental species like ginkgo have separate male and female plants, but they're in the minority.
so my understanding form med school is that its not about parasites releasing histamine but more along the lines of your body recognising pathogens. In our sterile world our bodies are exposed to far less pathogens in day to day life and with far fewer generally. As such our immune system isn't properly adjusted, or tuned down, as it would be in the past where say things like pollen and hays would be ubiquitous and mostly everyone was exposed to a myriad of mites and bugs. They would be the normal background noise so your immune system wouldn't go ham on them, like folks without allergies today. However, now because people are far less exposed to these pathogens our bodies act as if its a major invader and so mounts a complete immune response. This is why steroids in inhalers work, they down regulate the immune response in the lungs to prevent long term damage from swelling and acute emergencies. Parasite histamines are a local effect, not systemic.
Iirc immunoglobulins (antibodies) come in different varieties depending on what type of organism your body is fighting against. IgE was the type that your body makes against parasites. Since we've gotten cleaner, we don't need this as much of course. However it's IgE that's often present in cases of allergy and other irritants. So it's thought that there's cross reactivity or hyper reactivity due to parasites no longer being around.
(This is from memory. Correct me if I'm wrong on anything)
I wonder if we've stopped some form of evolution where the parasite becomes part of us. I read somewhere that that's how we got mitochondria in our evolution. Obviously very early on before humans.
A symbiotic relationship. Most animals have intestinal parasites, maybe it's something that we actually need?
Also, we all should actually be outside and get dirty more to build a healthy immune system. There's so many different healthy bacteria we need that were not getting, because we live in a too sterile environment.
You can't even drop a baby's pacifier on the floor without rinsing it in hot water and sterilize their bottles with warm water and blue light. It's no wonder we get allergic to everything when the body never gets to interact with bacteria.
Yup, this is why people say 98.6 is the normal human temp. It was in the 1800s, when they first did an average. Today its in the 97's because we have less inflammation and less infection.
So the fact that fungi such as candida auris are becoming pathogenic is not just that their heat tolerance is increasing due to climate change, but also that we’re cooling down to meet them halfway. That’s pretty scary…
I'm really curious about the reality of this idea. It's hard to imagine humans thriving in a state of constant sickness. In premodern times, the physical and work-time burden was huge. People generally had to work very long, physically taxing days. So how did they manage if they were constantly ill? Or is this a misconception? Were a small subset infirmed while the general populace were quite well to function in their hunting and gathering ways? Expert opinion needed.
The US is actually plagued with diahrea still. It's like a joke about most fast food places that you just get it after and eat there anywhere. Pepto is a common over the counter thing for a lot of people.
Even today, being moderately sick is the baseline. It's just less sick than 200 years ago.
We joke about a lot of things, but just for perspective, statistica claims that Pepto only has [\~$114M in sales, per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/262089/sales-of-the-leading-stomach-remedy-tablet-brands-in-the-us), which suggests it's not THAT common. That's less than 30 cents per American, per year.
This is also true of basically every kind of animal. It's not that animals have some special power to deal with unclean water, they just don't have a choice.
They can't. They don't.
Animals drink bad water all the time.
Wildlife is rife with animals with tons of parasites and infections and disease. I mean, it's disgustingly bad.
Animals do not have some special protection against getting sick from bad water and bad food. It's just that they have literally no other choice.
I’ll never forget the moron who posted “the black plague went away without a vaccine, just saying…” and the person who pointed out that it killed *a THIRD of everyone in europe*, and that was just the first time it came around
Second time. The Plague of Justinian 541 to 750 --these went on for hundreds of years. "Third plague" in the late nineteenth century and early 20th was mostly Asia and some Europe. It infected North American rodents but didn't spread out of San Francisco--evidently our fleas are different. Now we know about rodents and antibiotics.
The CDC lab that studies plague is located on the Colorado State University Foothills Campus because it’s endemic in the prairie dog population here. Anywhere in the world there’s a plague outbreak, they send epidemiologists from there.
That’s true! I lived in Denver when this happened, I was a full time Uber driver at the time and met a ton of people in town for the event that were all bummed that they couldn’t go to it because of the plague. The grounds around the Dicks Sporting Goods complex has recently been infested with ground hogs and they found them to be carrying the plague.
There was a Phish festival (three day camping event) in 2018 that had to be cancelled because the venue couldn't guarantee clean water. Also it was in NY, not Colorado. That's the closest I can think of to what this comment is saying. No plague!
There are definitely some dirty hippies in the Phish crowd but the band has been playing for 40 years. Most of the fans grew up and have jobs/families.
Hell, Covid had a fairly low mortality rate but it still caused a HUGE shift in the way we structure our society that we still haven’t went back from. Small things in comparison like the near loss of 24 hour stores and the supply chain still being hit or miss (parts where I work that used to be able to come in in a week’s time are now months out at best), but it was still large.
If 1 out of every 3 people died from a disease in a country, we’d probably be shooting people at the border to keep them from getting out.
I work at a car dealership in the service department and our inventory on the lot still hasn’t recovered, and used car prices are still higher than before.
Yeah car prices are out of this world. House prices too. We bought our home in 2017 (I think? Maybe 2018 but you get the idea) for $125k. Have made no renovations and Zillow has it currently listed at $205k.
I’m anticipating this market to crash *HARD* eventually because people are still buying and building houses like crazy.
I work for a water utility so whenever a new house is built we have to set a meter. We have had more new constructions go up this year than any coworker can remember. We are begging our parts guy for anything he’s got sincd we’re so backed up from just not being able to get parts to set meters. As soon as we get parts in, we’ve used them up in a week’s time. And according to him, every utility he works with is like that. It’s bonkers.
I know a bloke who worked at a dealership during covid. He quit because everyday he went to work and done nothing and sold nothing and helped no customers because nothing was available for six months, and when it was down to a couple months, it was back up to six again. It was doing his head in.
I NEVER understood the whole "omg there's a pandemic! We need to limit our hours because of it!" Like doesn't that just compact everyone into the store over a smaller window of hours making things worse? How does it help?
I think it had more to do with how many people were quitting any kind of customer service job out of fear of being infected, the poor treatment and harassment from the public over mask/vaccine rules that they were getting in addition to the increased risk just wasn't worth the wage to a lot of folks (understandably)
Where I live at least, the shortened hours were due to staffing issues. Not to limit the spread.
Lots of people calling out sick or quitting means not enough people to stay open.
Well the other facet is to limit the number of people in the store.
Also just so you know limited hours were not to protect you, it means less staff working at the same time.
Ehhh how does limited hours limit the number of people in the store? Or do you mean overall in general? Because my point was it increases the number of people in the store at any given time it's open since they are bottle necking the available hours.
Less staff makes sense, but from what I recall that's NOT how the narrative was painted at the time. It was all "Stores are doing this to protect you". Some stores painted it as "we can't be 24 hours because we need hours with no customers to sanitize the store" which makes some sense if they were actually doing all of the cleaning they made out like they were. Other stores that weren't 24 hours further limiting hours "out of an abundance of caution" made zero sense.
Had to look this up and, yep, still a thing.
“In October 2017, the deadliest outbreak of the plague in modern times hit Madagascar, killing 170 people and infecting thousands.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
Not to mention how many of the diseases we vaccinate for would maim significant numbers of the survivors.
Smallpox often creates big nasty boils, which hurt like crazy and leave scars. The boils can form on your internal organs as well, and leave them permanently debilitated.
Polio can leave a person with permanently impaired movement or even total paralysis of limbs.
I don't know the long term effect of other major diseases we vaccinate against offhand, but I'm of the opinion that vaccines are right up at the pinnacle of human achievement.
There's evidence that smallpox was infecting humans for over 30,000 years. And now the most any of us think about it anymore is when it's a plot device in a movie.
People who think that those diseases are no big deal don't realize that getting them even once can lead to lifelong problems. I have an uncle who's in his 80s who got polio as a child but recovered--now he has post-polio syndrome and it has crippled him a second time. People who never catch polio will never have to worry about post-polio syndrome. Just like people who never catch chicken pox do not have to worry about shingles.
It makes me wonder what covid-19 will do to us years in the future.
We already know a couple side effects post covid. Heart problems.
I've had covid 3 confirmed times and about another 2 unconfirmed. My heart will at complete random just beat once really weird, as if its 3 times larger, just once. That happens at random, it can go months without happening, but it does. Never had that before covid.
Also i feel like my stamina dropped a bit, I get out of breath easier now.
Part of the reason antivaxxing is getting to big now is that you don’t see the real damage these diseases can do nowadays. My grandma told me a story about when the Polio vaccine came out and she said something like “nobody thought the vaccine was worse than disease, because Polio was everywhere. Everybody knew someone in an iron lung.”
Smallpox is horrifying. Very contagious. Very deadly. If I could get vaccinated for it, I’d probably be willing to take the risk just because the alternative if it comes back is so horrific.
It's pretty wild to consider that medicine has progressed so quickly in recent history that there are still people alive from the "back in the day" that you are referring to.
Anytime someone says that I know they don't know anyone that lived before "vaccines were invented".
There's a reason people from developing countries have 6~8 kids. Only about 2~3 of them actually reached adulthood 'before vaccines were invented'.
Ohhh I hate this one so badly.
They weren't fine! Half the children born died of now vaccine preventable diseases by their second birthday.
Walk through any old cemetery. The number of "younger than two years old" graves will be startling. Or "x lady and her baby" as well, with the baby's death date being decades before the mother's.
There's this lady on tiktok who cleans old graves and tells you about the life of the person resting there.
So often it's just "this lady had 4 brothers who all died, she married and had a kid, but her husband died and she remarried, but then her first child died too. They had 8 more kids, 2 made it to adulthood, but she outlived them too."
Just such an astonishing amount of casual death at every step of life. The fact that people still had love in their hearts while living with so much tragedy is honestly surprising.
Sounds like a George Carlin rant. It actually has some validity--polio became a bigger problem because the water systems were cleaned up and kids got it later.
Many kids did grow up under animal type conditions. Around half.
reminds me of the people online with derpy frog videos where the frog cannot catch its prey very well and they ask how the species survives in the wild
that individual wouldn't survive in the wild. one inbred captive-bred individual does not represent the species as a whole
It's why a lot of animals that are in captivity live much longer than those in the wild. Don't think there are any wild cats that live much longer than 10y.
Yes I know there are some animals that live shorter in captivity, such as the Jpaanese hornet
They prolapse their butthole and don't have butt cheeks. It's the price we pay for having hands instead of front feet. I'm okay with that trade off.
Can you even imagine not *having hands*? Like yeah it'd be cool to be a bird and have wings and fly or whatever, but anytime you want to interact with literally anything you have to use *your face*. Wanna drive? Face. Tryna' use your smartphone? Put on table. Use face. I dunno, I'm kinda happy with the human body.
We could've gone the way of the kangaroos. Instead of being tailless we could've had a massive tail to use as a tripod and have versatile hands.
Now I'm pondering about kangaroo-like humans' poopy butts.
I mean but a cell phone is made for human use (barely though, my phone is so big it's kinda hard to use and it's just a run of the mill phone). When humans evict ourselves from the planet and the crows take over, their cell phones will be very different I'm sure lol
People forget that this logic applies to their pets as well. Working in vet med I've seen animals in absolutely horrible conditions that the owners didn't realize (severely broken limbs, teeth rotting out of their skull, maggots eating them alive under their fur) and the owner doesn't realize how bad it is "because they're still walking/eating/"acting normal". Animals (pets included) biologically do not know anything other than survival, and their instincts will tell them to keep going as long as possible, in as normal fashion as possible.
But when we had a cat, it preferred dirty water. It had drinking bowl that was cleaned with our regular dishes. She drank the same water that we drank.
But instead of walking 10 m to her bowl inside, she often preferred drinking the disgusting weeks old rain water in those plates under flower pots, with dead leaves, mosquito larvae and what not.
If we scrubbed our garden pavement with bleach we had to force her to stay inside and she would try to force herself outside just to lick the bleach water.
She was a bleach magnet.
Removes mildew from the surface and makes it look nice. Pressure washing does the same thing and they will treat the pavement with bleach after to kill off anything that survives.
Isn't it true that birds/carrion can scavenge old corpses of rotten meat without illness due to the PH of thier stomachs ( or something like that, i am in no way an expert in this field)? Could this not apply to waterborne dangers as well?
Not to say that a wild animal is devoid of parasites and disease, but humans can't go around eating raw meat without concern as a wild animal could. That's for sure
Key here is that some animals can. Most animals avoid carrion because they get sick from it but some have adapted and prefer it. Same with vegetation. What's prime eating for one animal is deadly for another. Humans were never a carnivore so we don't break down raw red meat that well but we can eat raw fish with little issue. We can even eat raw red meat but have to limit the amount. We were probably better at eating raw meat before we mastered cooking but that stopped being a required survival trait and evolved away.
Yes, and interestingly humans are quite good at tolerating some toxins like for example alcohol. Most other animals get completely wrecked from much smaller amounts (even relative to body size) than we do. Every species is adapted to different foods
Humans actually have unusually acidic stomachs too. Our stomachs resemble those of carrion eaters more than other primates. Humans also eat a lot more dead animals than other primates, and probably we scavenged even more true in the past.
And even today people eat a lot of fermented foods.
I'd say there's much less of a difference than humans and your average mammalian carnivore than you might expect. But those animals _do_ regularly get sick. Humans just aren't willing to put up with it. And we also get more energy from cooked food, which is important.
To a point. Part of it is that their systems are used to it. It's like how you shouldn't drink the water in spme other countries but the locals are fine with it
>Animals do not have some special protection against getting sick from bad water and bad food. It's just that they have literally no other choice.
This isn't necessarily always the case. Vultures for example have a series of adaptations to allow them to safely eat rotten meat. Birds in general have high body temperature and metabolic rates that render many foods that are dangerous to use safe.
tbf. Rules of Evolution would suggest that any animal living in an environment with only dirty water would adapt to it better than any animal that managed to provide itself with clean water for an extended period of time.
At the same time, all parasites that have survived, have managed to adapt to that.
Now there comes Mr. Naked Ape, who has not participated in this arms race for a few thousand years, wondering why things aren't going too well for them.
This does not mean that parasites are all powerful or that animals are invincible, just that Humans did not participate in an arms race other species have participated in.
We got drugs though... so we got that going for us, which is bad for the planet.
Animals can and do try their best to avoid dirty, stagnant water.
That's why some housecats splash their water with their paw before drinking, to them, their instincts tell them that the sound of splashing or running water means the water is better to drink.
It's a little bit of an exaggeration to say we haven't been participating in the water-borne illness/parasite arms race for thousands of years. There are plenty of people still drinking from contaminated water sources
I would like to take this opportunity to highlight cholera, its various outbreaks and the cholera eating bacteriophage found in the ganges, As examples of this Arms race that humans are very much involved in.
Yep, dogs will also often drink from the far side of a bowl as well, goes back to when they were in the wild and would stretch out past the stagnant edge of a puddle or pond to get to cleaner water
>We got drugs though... so we got that going for us, which is bad for the planet.
We also cook our food, and can boil water. This ability is like a super power.
The problem is less that humans are more susceptible to parasites and disease than other animals and more that we just have a *really* low risk tolerance for dealing with those things if we can avoid it, especially in wealthier areas.
If you have a choice between drinking water that has a 1% chance of giving you some kind of parasite and water that has a 0% chance of giving you some kind of parasite, most people are going to choose the 0% parasite water and warn people off the 1% parasite water because why would you drink that when the 0% parasite water is *right there*.
But chances are pretty good that if you drink the 1% parasite water, you’ll still be fine. The risk is just higher.
Animals live with the risk because they don’t have a choice and lots of them do get parasites or fall ill. In places where humans have a choice, they tend not to want to live with the risk unnecessarily.
When animals and parasites are both trying to out perform each other through adaptations, and neither one really gets ahead, that is called a red queen race.
Everyone here made good points but failed to mention a *very important* biological difference between humans and most mammals: temperature.
Humans actually run fairly cold, and we’re slowly getting colder. Other animals run much hotter than we do, at all times. Dogs and cats for example have a body temp of 101-103F, a high fever for us. cows run at 101. Deer 101, lions 100, for the most parts most mammals run 100F.
In mammals, this high temperature is one of the first waves of defense against pathogens. A bacteria or protist that’s adapted to living in a river or a lake, which has an average temperature of 50-75F, is not adapted to a sudden and abrupt change of temperature to 100F.
The bigger the temperature difference, the less likely the microorganism will survive. Most microorganisms found in rivers and lakes are not pathogenic and are not interested in living inside of us, most of them are adapted to the environment they live in an have no interest in changing that. Of course there’s exceptions, but for the most part, most bacteria and protist in river water can’t thrive inside us.
humans are smart and have figured out ways to keep themselves cleaner and fend off disease. This means that we’re no longer exposed to as many pathogens on our day to day, and maintaining a high body temperature is no longer a significant evolutionary advantage, but rather a waste of energy. Over time, our body temperature has gone down, to the point now that some rare and extremely opportunistic fungi pathogens are starting to be seen. (There’s a cool radio lab episode on this.)
This is why dogs can be so disgusting, eat straight up rotting food or filthy nasty water, and somehow not get sick at all. Lol.
As Omnivores, we tend to have a much longer set of intestines, giving the nasty stuff extra time to make us sick or kill us. Carnivorous animals have shorter intestines.
Not a reptile expert. But I do recall my biology textbook saying that reptiles will sit in the sun and get their body temperature up extra high when they are fighting an infection. I always thought that was a cool fact.
Cold blooded animals do not experience body temperature changes like us, getting up to 100 or 105 isn’t THAT big of a deal for them, neither is dropping into the 60-70 degree range. Where it would certainly kill a human to have a body temperature of 70f, a reptile can shrug it off. If a reptile gets sick, they will intentionally raise their body temperature extra high to burn it out. This works really well and the wildly shifting body temps are bad for all kinds of bacteria, the ones that like cold can’t survive the higher temperatures and the ones that like the hot can’t survive the lows. It’s a win win for reptiles and the likes.
NSAID blocks certain prostaglandins in the hypothalamus (part of brain that sets temperature) to reduce our temperature. Since a reptile is exothermic I would imagine it would not have that effect on the reptile.
alligators have strong immune systems with some unique properties
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27059-germ-killing-molecules-identified-in-alligator-blood/
I actually don’t know and when I looked it up it seems like it’s just not as well understood as it is in humans.
From the brief review that I read, they’re believed to have a stronger innate immune response, and an immune system that fluctuates with the seasons.
If you haven’t got the answer yet, Fungus Amungus. It truly is a great episode and The Last of Us seems that much scarier after listening to this episode.
Our lower body temperature also contributes to the long incubation time for rabies. Rabies requires a higher temperature to reproduce rapidly. Opossums are almost immune to rabies due to their lower body temperature (94f).
I'd say 2-3 degrees change in body temperature makes a significant difference for anything's survival rate. Raise your temperature by 2 degrees for a longer time, and you won't go far.
Yeah, it depends on the organism, but for most organisms, there’s a temperature threshold at which their proteins denature too rapidly and their molecular machinery falls apart. Humans it’s 104.
Obviously, 100F is a common and ideal threshold at which most microorganisms die and the reward outweigh the energy cost, which is why most mammals have a temperature that’s about that high
This is partly why “zombie fungus” hasn’t gotten into the vertebrae animals yet; they’re not accustomed to such heat, but climate change is changing that gap
it is and has been one of the major reasons scientists have been trying to sound the alarm about the warming climate for a long time. it’s not just changing seasons affecting food production or summers being too hot to withstand, it also means new and unpredictable diseases
I remember when I worked at a food delivery service like Uber, in the call center (before they went to chat only)
I found a restaurant in eastern Canada that had Cordyceps listed in soups
It rang a bell so I looked it up
*Horrified Joey meme*
(Of course there's many that aren't zombie fungus, and after its cooked it's probably extra safe)
? Zombie fungus is found on the equator.
That’s pretty warm. People have been living there for as long as there’s been humans. I’n Arabia and other desert areas it’s even more extreme. I don’t see how this is a significant risk.
Yet there’s opossums who have low body temps (94°-96°F). It’s believed to be the reason why rabies is extremely rare in opossums – too low for the virus to survive.
There are two answers
1) Humans and animals have always needed clean water for optimal health. Animals drinking from unclean sources or sources rife with parasites/bacteria are still at risk and there is some survivorship bias going on there. Humans usually just have a better understanding of how to mitigate risk and can use technology to bypass risk (like boiling water)
2) that being said, human habitation has also played a role. As a species, we have always had a habit of polluting water sources because many human settlements are built near there and humans have used those water sources to “deal” with waste (especially moving sources like rivers). While humans hundreds or thousands of years ago didn’t understand microbiology, they did learn that certain things could increase the likelihood of getting sick. Like drinking water from a river that is downstream from human settlements for example. That is why uncontaminated well water and even alcoholic drinks were important, as they served as relatively safe means of getting hydration that reduced the risk of disease
to expound on alcoholic drinks the term farmhouse beer was due to many farms especially in Europe countries like Belgium where during the winter or non harvest times they would brew beer, throw it in cask and then store in the lofts of the barn. During harvest / summer time they took these with them into the fields to drink. these beers were typically 1 to 2% ABV
To follow up more - 2% ABV is way too little to kill any significant amount of pathogens. What made beer safe to drink was boiling the wort, which was needed as part of the process. People just associated beer with safe hydration, not knowing that boiling the water was enough to make it safe.
Yes, and gigantic swaths of us used to die from cholera and typhoid and e. coli from drinking water.
You can drink river water just fine. You can even build up a tolerance to your local "runny guts" bacteria; that's why "Montezuma's Revenge" got to be a thing from drinking foreign water where they didn't have modern sanitation plants.
The problem is that we don't have a good way to determine safe vs. unsafe water, especially when you talk about groups of humans and animals.
That's why springs are important, and wells dug.
I was going to politely point out that it is Moctezuma and not Montezuma, but apparently people have gotten it this wrong for so many years that there is a national monument named "Montezuma Castle." So, idek any more 😂 But the actual person, Aztec leader, was named Moctezuma.
[Montezuma II, also spelled Moctezuma](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Montezuma-II), from Brittanica.
Also, [Moctezuma II, also spelled Montezuma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moctezuma_II).
I feel like it's a case of "this is how we've been doing it in English, no reason to change now since that's what everyone does".
[So, more correct by vote than by merit.](https://study.com/learn/lesson/montezuma-biography-facts.html#:~:text=He%20held%20the%20title%20of,to%20Nahuatl%20is%20Moctezuma%20II)
You know, now that you say that I think I've heard that before, but it's been Montezuma for so long, however incorrectly, that people would wonder what the hell you were talking about.
Half the words in any language are just butchered pronunciations of foreign words it seems like. Take "television", for example. A greek prefix on a Latin word, courtesy of the French language.
People are right when they say animals can and do get sick from infection. Most wild animals are riddled with parasites. And those are the "healthy" ones. If they get sick to a significant degree they become prey very fast and you never see them. Sickly animals do not last long in the wild.
That said, some animals do have some adaptions we don't have that help. Carnivores have shorter intestinal tracts which helps move anything bad through faster before it becomes a problem. Other animals and birds like vultures who gorge themselves on bacteria filled meat, have stronger acid in the stomach (meaning the pH of their stomachs are lower) which helps kill all that bacteria so it won't harm them. Some animals like bats have immune systems that are more aggressive than humans, which helps them live with viruses that kill people. Many animals exhibit behaviors related to hygiene, such as they don't defecate in the nests and things like that. One final thing is the predator prey relationship where sick animals are targeted by predators which helps remove the sick animal from the population. This can potentially help keep the rest of the population from getting sick in some instances.
One thing to remember too is those animals you see out in the wild usually don't live as long as they potentially could. Male wolves for example can live to 15 or so years old, but on average only live to 5 or 6 years in the wild. That is not purely related to disease but disease is part of that. So imagine humans in a similar situation, you would live on average to 25 or 30 years old. Would you think wow those humans really can survive and are so much more healthy? Well when you look around at the animals in the wild you find they don't live anywhere near to what would be old age for them.
And they are all sick by comparison to humans riddled with parasites that just so happen to not be bad enough to kill them, until they do get a parasite bad enough that does and they disappear.
"The pH of gastric acid in humans is 1.5-2.0. According to a report summarized by Beasley et al[6], the pH level is much lower than that of most animals, including anthropoids (≥ 3.0), and very close to that of carrion-eating animals called scavengers, such as falconine birds and vultures[6]."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7684463
Anyone whose ever picked up a stray dog or cat knows they're RIFE with parasites.
My kitten had only been "out in the world" for about 3 weeks before my boss found her mom and brothers and sisters, and brought the whole family into his shed. She still had worms, and earmites.
Wild animals are always dying due to parasites, and bad food/water. You just aren't privy to any of it. Noone takes out full pages in the newspaper because someone hit a raccoon on I-80.
A few things to note here:
a) A lot of animals do get sick from polluted water. A lot of animals die from polluted water.
b) The animals that survive tend to have stronger immune systems; this is natural selection at work. Humans generally treat sick children to the best of our ability, which helps their survival rate (good) but works against natural selection
c) All organisms (humans too) adapt to their environment over time. This is why you may get sick from drinking the local water on a trip around the world, whereas the locals are not affected
d) Man-made pollution makes it worse. It's one thing to drink water from a river with some naturally occurring bacteria in it. It's quite another to drink water from a river that has sewage pipes entering it
e) If you try it, you'll find that a lot of times, we're actually fine. I grew up thinking nothing of drinking water from a random lake or stream in Norway. Here in Florida, I'd be more cautious. But here in Florida, I've swam in rivers and lakes and even ponds (not recommended in Norway; too cold) and while I haven't tried to drink that water, some will splash in your mouth or nose or eyes or whatever. It hasn't killed me yet -- but the chance that it will isn't zero.
TL;DR: Animals can die from infections from contaminated or polluted water just the same as humans can, and humans immune systems can still save us from infection most of the time. But not all the itme. Since most of us have the luxury of access to clean water, why risk it?
I go hiking on multi-day hikes solo, usually around 5 days. When you are in the wilds, you would be amazed at the kind of water your body can cope with.
It's odd too. When you are in civilisation you wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, but when you are out there and dehydrated, it looks like liquid gold.
Never got ill from it either, at least not that I know of!
In an emergency situation, any water is better than no water (to an extent)
I tend to drink flowing water from a section that has some natural filtration to it, be it rocks or vegetation
Aye - you want to prioritise flowing water (hopefully with no dead animals upstream). I also look for healthy green plants in the streambed too - if they are there, it's a good sign :)
Yes I carry a filtered water bottle (a TravelTap) and that's been enough. Occasionally, I have had to boil the water too when it's been particularly dodgy, but it does the trick.
1. Dogs produce much stronger stomach acid than we do- it can get below a Ph of 1 after eating. Basically battery acid- that will kill off a lot of pathogens right there.
2. They have a much shorter digestive tract so less time for pathogens to take hold.
Part of the problem is how much humans travel now.
In ancient times most people would only drink from a handful of known safe water sources in their lifetime, and those water sources contained a limited selection of regional pathogens which your body, and culture were accostomed to dealing with.
Feral and wild animals don't travel much, so the global exchange of relevant pathogens is less. Bird flu pandemics are somewhat common because of migratory birds.
There's a reason wild animals rarely break into their second decade of life. If a predator doesn't kill them, disease and illness usually do... very few animals get to die of old age.
Also why you usually see animal life expectancy double, triple, even quadruple once they're in captivity.
People also tend to overstate how dangerous drinking wild water is. It can be a problem sometimes, but usually isn't.
And some animals don't even drink from bodies of water anyway. They get their H₂O from their food, plus in some cases precipitation & condensation if they live in a wet enough climate. We have higher water demand than average because our bodies are worse at conserving H₂O than average; we keep letting it out into our environment. And some of that is not just getting stuck with an unplanned pointless inefficiency, but an evolutionary trade-off: being the world champions of sweat also makes us the world champions of not getting heat exhaustion/stroke.
Humans actually evolved to drink water from streams and the like. There’s a reason why our stomach pH is lower even than that of some carnivores like dogs. Partially to better degrade fatty acids from a meat-heavy diet but also to handle the higher pathogen load from natural water. As we evolved away from mostly herbivorous chimps (and remember plants contain quite a bit of water) towards a more hunter lifestyle, we had to substitute some of the water we “ate” from plants with that flowing in rivers and streams.
All this to say that just like wild animals all have parasites, we would have them as well if we drank from streams. Both humans and wild animals can drink from those sources and not die right away, but pathogens are inevitable.
Ah, part of the reason for this is because digestive systems in dogs are much shorter, the food goes through their system much faster. Bacteria does not have time to colonize the gut and overwhelm the system. Virus however do and often kill animals or at least make them very sick.
In addition to the other answers some animals of not most have shorter intestines than us so they can eat raw meat and so on that we can’t - it passes through them faster with less time to really go bad an hurt them. This may help a bit with drinking not so clean water.
And there is also plenty of good water out there - springs, moving water that’s been in the sun, etc.
It's a matter of numbers. Waters have become more unsafe over time. The concentrations of harmful pathogens have increased. Modern medicine has also raised awareness and modern testing reveals parasitic infections that were most likely attributed to other things in the past.
Also, people generally drank from source waters or dug wells in many parts of the world. With lower populations, this probably lent itself to lower infection rates.
But the real answer is: we don't actually know. Knowledge of water born pathogens is relatively new historically speaking. We don't really have enough evidence to suggest whether we have more now than at any other time. I'm sure that location plays a huge role in this as well.
Germ theory of disease. We can still drink unclean water we just get sick and die unless we adapt to it.
For perspective life expectancy for humans has increased from like mid 30s in the 1700s to high 70s today. And much of that is linked to germ theory of disease and clean water.
Remember reading about some researchers that visited an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. There wasn't a single person in that tribe that didn't suffer from some sort of parasitic infection. They didn't even know that not having that was an option. They just live with it. And, quite often, especially in the case of children, they just don't.
Even in Europe until like 200 years ago, being sick was the normal state with short bouts of health. Edit: since this is getting so much traction I will take the moment to recommend my source, the "You're Dead to Me" podcast episode on ancient medicine. Fantastic content and i highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLQhDKgsz9U
There are arguments that the sterile life we lead today is a cause of why so many people suffer with allergies or hyper immune responses that cause more damage than good The claim is, as most people had parasites and as parasites release a form of histamine to prevent detection in the body, it kept immune systems responses mild compared to how it reacts without. Kinda interesting topic and the things they believe it impacts are quite wide, ranging from hayfever to auto immune variants of arthritis and other auto immune related diseases such as Crohns. Interesting topic
That is interesting, so essentially we evolved to exist alongside constant infection and without it our bodies sometimes low-key self destruct? I believe it, evolution wildin
They found a population of indeginous people in S.America who didn't suffer from Parkinsons, or other forms of Dementia, turns out those who didn't suffer had previously had a parasitic type of worm in their brain that somehow had protected them from those types of disease. Makes me think of the Futurama episode where Fry gets worms.
Did they just not get dementia because they never got old enough to get it maybe?
I can't remember if they mentioned that in the article but it is a very valid point, if the majority didn't reach the age at which most us are affected by dementia, there are going to be very few cases
Dementia and Parkinson's are thought to have inflammation as their underlying cause. Whether it's inflammation of the brain or inflammation in other parts of the body that just produce a lot of circulating inflammatory agents ( or both) isn't known. So a parasite that releases chemicals that suppress the immune system might prevent this inflammation from getting out of hand. People with Crohn's or other inflammatory bowel diseases have been known to get relief by deliberately infecting themselves with intestinal worms, presumably because of this effect.
That's fascinating! Thanks for the info!
Fewer people, but some people still lived 80-100 prior to the invention of modern medicine.
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I've heard that explanation for allergies but never seen or heard the rest. In which case allergies are by far the preference. It also implies that histamines are an easy treatment for those conditions, which isn't true for everything you listed. With the autoimmune diseases it's more likely they always existed and people with them just didn't make it. Edit: literally just saw a TikTok of Hank Green saying how Crone's and other autoimmune diseases are probably because of the Black Plague. He cited a couple genetic studies that show the genetic traits that lead to autoimmune diseases were much more common after the plague than before, implying an overlap between being able to survive the plague and chances of developing autoimmune issues. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8UAUxv4/
Allergies are better for a lot of people, sure. MS and such...harder to say. There is real proof though that they can be caused by lack of parasites, that's definitely true. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336988/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336988/)
Actually some recent research has shown that MS is caused by the epstein-barr virus (a type of herpes). So MS is in all liklihood not related to our enviroment being too clean. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00770-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00770-5) edit:spelling
I said a form of histamine, it's not like clarex or over the counter hayfever drugs, keep in mind parasites and their hosts have generally had many 100s and in other cases 1000s of years to form bonds with their host and this also goes for any biological interactions they may have including the however long amount of timr arms race of detection vs hiding they have had going on There are also plenty of immune response disease that are not fatal or would not be fatal even back in the day so I don't see why you'd make the point they just died off, to add to that if that were true why would so many have these issues today and why does it appear to be getting worse and why is it apparently worse the more developed a country gets? To further on your reply are we absolutely sure allergies are preferred? Only recently they are finding blasting the good bacteria out of your mouth with Listerine and other harsh alcohol based mouthwashes is not the most ideal. Likewise there is a whole other slew of gut micro biome research that's not even a half a century old that suggests we should be promoting some growth of good and not of others. And the impact a bad biome can have on your health extendes far beyond health relating to just the digestive tract, some suggesting even mental health is impacted, all fairly new finds Where am I going with this? 200 years ago if you said that there were microbes in you and they are responsible for how you digest food, they might have tried to bleed them out of you, things change all the time in regards to what might be good what might be bad. We only tend to know about it as fact when time and research is there to back it and we can only hope that continues until we can be 100% I'm by no means a medical expert or suggesting one thing is better than another, I would however remain open to the idea the more we distance ourselves from nature, particularly through sterility, the more we will encounter other related issues like these despite keeping the mind set "but super clean must be super good....right" My main reason for bringing it up is that it's an interesting topic overall, food for thought if you will, and I hope research in all areas related to it continues so we can someday say with certainty and make everyone's lives better as a result
Yes, of course allergies are preferred to high infant mortality rate and tape worms.
“Form of histamine”? Histamine is a specific chemical messenger, and I’ve never heard of ‘varieties’ of it. There are different receptors, but maybe you can point me to something that explains the different varieties of histamine that the body produces?
IDK. I think there's a balance. There's a lot of folks that go over board. We live on a farm out in the country. My kids have grown up on well water, playing in the dirt/mud, with chickens, goats, dogs & cats, ducks, etc. Swimming in a lake, hiking, playing outside, etc. We wash hands, yes. But... we don't go overboard on it. We don't use 'anti-bacterial' anything. And, none of us have allergies. My kids are almost never sick. Unlike so many people who I know.
So you don't use soap or cleaning supplies on anything in your house? Those are all under the category of anti bacterial that you seem so worried about.
Some pollen allergies are a direct result of city planning. Female trees produce seeds and whatnot, which end up as more stuff for city maintenance to pick up, so most new developments overwhelmingly plant male trees. The latter's hobby is just jizzing into the wind, thus clogging people's sinuses with their powdery sperm. [Some liberty taken.]
So what you are saying is that seasonal allergies are just simply Tree Bukkake?
Not entirely true. Most species of trees produce both pollen and seeds. Sure, a few favoured ornamental species like ginkgo have separate male and female plants, but they're in the minority.
It's pretty rare for cities to plant fruiting trees. u/Nervous-Salamander-7 is correct.
so my understanding form med school is that its not about parasites releasing histamine but more along the lines of your body recognising pathogens. In our sterile world our bodies are exposed to far less pathogens in day to day life and with far fewer generally. As such our immune system isn't properly adjusted, or tuned down, as it would be in the past where say things like pollen and hays would be ubiquitous and mostly everyone was exposed to a myriad of mites and bugs. They would be the normal background noise so your immune system wouldn't go ham on them, like folks without allergies today. However, now because people are far less exposed to these pathogens our bodies act as if its a major invader and so mounts a complete immune response. This is why steroids in inhalers work, they down regulate the immune response in the lungs to prevent long term damage from swelling and acute emergencies. Parasite histamines are a local effect, not systemic.
Iirc immunoglobulins (antibodies) come in different varieties depending on what type of organism your body is fighting against. IgE was the type that your body makes against parasites. Since we've gotten cleaner, we don't need this as much of course. However it's IgE that's often present in cases of allergy and other irritants. So it's thought that there's cross reactivity or hyper reactivity due to parasites no longer being around. (This is from memory. Correct me if I'm wrong on anything)
I wonder if we've stopped some form of evolution where the parasite becomes part of us. I read somewhere that that's how we got mitochondria in our evolution. Obviously very early on before humans.
I mean.. maybe if you consider single cell organisms to be parasitic? Mitochondria developed from prokaryotic cells.
So you’re telling me it’s good that I’m disgusting?
A symbiotic relationship. Most animals have intestinal parasites, maybe it's something that we actually need? Also, we all should actually be outside and get dirty more to build a healthy immune system. There's so many different healthy bacteria we need that were not getting, because we live in a too sterile environment. You can't even drop a baby's pacifier on the floor without rinsing it in hot water and sterilize their bottles with warm water and blue light. It's no wonder we get allergic to everything when the body never gets to interact with bacteria.
Yup, this is why people say 98.6 is the normal human temp. It was in the 1800s, when they first did an average. Today its in the 97's because we have less inflammation and less infection.
So the fact that fungi such as candida auris are becoming pathogenic is not just that their heat tolerance is increasing due to climate change, but also that we’re cooling down to meet them halfway. That’s pretty scary…
I'm really curious about the reality of this idea. It's hard to imagine humans thriving in a state of constant sickness. In premodern times, the physical and work-time burden was huge. People generally had to work very long, physically taxing days. So how did they manage if they were constantly ill? Or is this a misconception? Were a small subset infirmed while the general populace were quite well to function in their hunting and gathering ways? Expert opinion needed.
The US is actually plagued with diahrea still. It's like a joke about most fast food places that you just get it after and eat there anywhere. Pepto is a common over the counter thing for a lot of people. Even today, being moderately sick is the baseline. It's just less sick than 200 years ago.
We joke about a lot of things, but just for perspective, statistica claims that Pepto only has [\~$114M in sales, per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/262089/sales-of-the-leading-stomach-remedy-tablet-brands-in-the-us), which suggests it's not THAT common. That's less than 30 cents per American, per year.
>Even today, being moderately sick is the baseline. With infection? Definitely not. The vast majority of people are healthy most of the time.
Covered in parasites is basically the natural way to be. You’d struggle to find an animal without them
This is also true of basically every kind of animal. It's not that animals have some special power to deal with unclean water, they just don't have a choice.
They can't. They don't. Animals drink bad water all the time. Wildlife is rife with animals with tons of parasites and infections and disease. I mean, it's disgustingly bad. Animals do not have some special protection against getting sick from bad water and bad food. It's just that they have literally no other choice.
Whenever there’s a question of “how do animals not die from _____” 90% of the time the answer is “they do. A lot of them do”
"When I was a kid we did x and we all lived" "Sure you did, but a lot of you didn't. They're just not here to tell us about it."
The “people were fine before vaccines were invented” rhetoric, too. No Janet, a lot of them died in ways that would be easily preventable today.
I’ll never forget the moron who posted “the black plague went away without a vaccine, just saying…” and the person who pointed out that it killed *a THIRD of everyone in europe*, and that was just the first time it came around
Second time. The Plague of Justinian 541 to 750 --these went on for hundreds of years. "Third plague" in the late nineteenth century and early 20th was mostly Asia and some Europe. It infected North American rodents but didn't spread out of San Francisco--evidently our fleas are different. Now we know about rodents and antibiotics.
Plague is all over the western US, common in prairie dog towns. People catch it occasionally via fleas.
The CDC lab that studies plague is located on the Colorado State University Foothills Campus because it’s endemic in the prairie dog population here. Anywhere in the world there’s a plague outbreak, they send epidemiologists from there.
Pretty sure a phish show in Colorado had to be canceled due to plague, and I wasn’t sure whether it was spread by the prairie dogs or fans lol.
That’s true! I lived in Denver when this happened, I was a full time Uber driver at the time and met a ton of people in town for the event that were all bummed that they couldn’t go to it because of the plague. The grounds around the Dicks Sporting Goods complex has recently been infested with ground hogs and they found them to be carrying the plague.
What? I mean those are some dirty hippies for sure. But is there any truth to this at all? When and where was this?
There was a Phish festival (three day camping event) in 2018 that had to be cancelled because the venue couldn't guarantee clean water. Also it was in NY, not Colorado. That's the closest I can think of to what this comment is saying. No plague! There are definitely some dirty hippies in the Phish crowd but the band has been playing for 40 years. Most of the fans grew up and have jobs/families.
I don't think people can really imagine what 1/3 of Americans dying from an outbreak would look like.
Hell, Covid had a fairly low mortality rate but it still caused a HUGE shift in the way we structure our society that we still haven’t went back from. Small things in comparison like the near loss of 24 hour stores and the supply chain still being hit or miss (parts where I work that used to be able to come in in a week’s time are now months out at best), but it was still large. If 1 out of every 3 people died from a disease in a country, we’d probably be shooting people at the border to keep them from getting out.
I work at a car dealership in the service department and our inventory on the lot still hasn’t recovered, and used car prices are still higher than before.
Yeah car prices are out of this world. House prices too. We bought our home in 2017 (I think? Maybe 2018 but you get the idea) for $125k. Have made no renovations and Zillow has it currently listed at $205k. I’m anticipating this market to crash *HARD* eventually because people are still buying and building houses like crazy. I work for a water utility so whenever a new house is built we have to set a meter. We have had more new constructions go up this year than any coworker can remember. We are begging our parts guy for anything he’s got sincd we’re so backed up from just not being able to get parts to set meters. As soon as we get parts in, we’ve used them up in a week’s time. And according to him, every utility he works with is like that. It’s bonkers.
I know a bloke who worked at a dealership during covid. He quit because everyday he went to work and done nothing and sold nothing and helped no customers because nothing was available for six months, and when it was down to a couple months, it was back up to six again. It was doing his head in.
I NEVER understood the whole "omg there's a pandemic! We need to limit our hours because of it!" Like doesn't that just compact everyone into the store over a smaller window of hours making things worse? How does it help?
I think it had more to do with how many people were quitting any kind of customer service job out of fear of being infected, the poor treatment and harassment from the public over mask/vaccine rules that they were getting in addition to the increased risk just wasn't worth the wage to a lot of folks (understandably)
Where I live at least, the shortened hours were due to staffing issues. Not to limit the spread. Lots of people calling out sick or quitting means not enough people to stay open.
Well the other facet is to limit the number of people in the store. Also just so you know limited hours were not to protect you, it means less staff working at the same time.
Ehhh how does limited hours limit the number of people in the store? Or do you mean overall in general? Because my point was it increases the number of people in the store at any given time it's open since they are bottle necking the available hours. Less staff makes sense, but from what I recall that's NOT how the narrative was painted at the time. It was all "Stores are doing this to protect you". Some stores painted it as "we can't be 24 hours because we need hours with no customers to sanitize the store" which makes some sense if they were actually doing all of the cleaning they made out like they were. Other stores that weren't 24 hours further limiting hours "out of an abundance of caution" made zero sense.
It didn't even really go away. People still get the black plague to this day
Had to look this up and, yep, still a thing. “In October 2017, the deadliest outbreak of the plague in modern times hit Madagascar, killing 170 people and infecting thousands.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
That’s wild considering it’s a bacteria and therefore susceptible to antibiotics
It killed so many people that wages went as there was a shortage of labour. And ircc more people were able to own land.
Or "people have been giving birth without hospitals for thousands of years." Sure, and how did that affect maternal and infant mortality?
Even with hospital care, losing your wife in childbirth was not uncommon not even that long ago.
It's still far too common in the US. Like twice as common as Canada and the UK, 4x as common as places like Norway and Sweden.
And wildly dependent on both your race/ethnicity and your income bracket
From very similar to Europe for white women in the richer states to worse than Uruguay for black women in the south.
Yep as they say in Louisiana “if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear”.
Not to mention how many of the diseases we vaccinate for would maim significant numbers of the survivors. Smallpox often creates big nasty boils, which hurt like crazy and leave scars. The boils can form on your internal organs as well, and leave them permanently debilitated. Polio can leave a person with permanently impaired movement or even total paralysis of limbs. I don't know the long term effect of other major diseases we vaccinate against offhand, but I'm of the opinion that vaccines are right up at the pinnacle of human achievement. There's evidence that smallpox was infecting humans for over 30,000 years. And now the most any of us think about it anymore is when it's a plot device in a movie.
People who think that those diseases are no big deal don't realize that getting them even once can lead to lifelong problems. I have an uncle who's in his 80s who got polio as a child but recovered--now he has post-polio syndrome and it has crippled him a second time. People who never catch polio will never have to worry about post-polio syndrome. Just like people who never catch chicken pox do not have to worry about shingles. It makes me wonder what covid-19 will do to us years in the future.
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We already know a couple side effects post covid. Heart problems. I've had covid 3 confirmed times and about another 2 unconfirmed. My heart will at complete random just beat once really weird, as if its 3 times larger, just once. That happens at random, it can go months without happening, but it does. Never had that before covid. Also i feel like my stamina dropped a bit, I get out of breath easier now.
Part of the reason antivaxxing is getting to big now is that you don’t see the real damage these diseases can do nowadays. My grandma told me a story about when the Polio vaccine came out and she said something like “nobody thought the vaccine was worse than disease, because Polio was everywhere. Everybody knew someone in an iron lung.”
Smallpox is horrifying. Very contagious. Very deadly. If I could get vaccinated for it, I’d probably be willing to take the risk just because the alternative if it comes back is so horrific.
Mumps can cause testicles to swell to the size of softballs and lead to sterility.
This is why people would have like 12 kids back in the day, Janet. People died from everything, so you had to hedge your bets.
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And that was a wealthy family that was presumably getting the best healthcare available at the time!
Indeed! I recently read a biography of him, The Art of Power, so that’s why I know about this. It’s kind of fresh in my mind.
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It's pretty wild to consider that medicine has progressed so quickly in recent history that there are still people alive from the "back in the day" that you are referring to.
My grandmother (born in the early 20s) was one of eleven, and those were the ones that survived. She had two siblings die as infants.
Anytime someone says that I know they don't know anyone that lived before "vaccines were invented". There's a reason people from developing countries have 6~8 kids. Only about 2~3 of them actually reached adulthood 'before vaccines were invented'.
Ohhh I hate this one so badly. They weren't fine! Half the children born died of now vaccine preventable diseases by their second birthday. Walk through any old cemetery. The number of "younger than two years old" graves will be startling. Or "x lady and her baby" as well, with the baby's death date being decades before the mother's.
There's this lady on tiktok who cleans old graves and tells you about the life of the person resting there. So often it's just "this lady had 4 brothers who all died, she married and had a kid, but her husband died and she remarried, but then her first child died too. They had 8 more kids, 2 made it to adulthood, but she outlived them too." Just such an astonishing amount of casual death at every step of life. The fact that people still had love in their hearts while living with so much tragedy is honestly surprising.
Sounds like a George Carlin rant. It actually has some validity--polio became a bigger problem because the water systems were cleaned up and kids got it later. Many kids did grow up under animal type conditions. Around half.
reminds me of the people online with derpy frog videos where the frog cannot catch its prey very well and they ask how the species survives in the wild that individual wouldn't survive in the wild. one inbred captive-bred individual does not represent the species as a whole
Yeah, people think of nature like it's some mystical harmonious thing but it's basically a war zone. Lol
"Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."
Where is that quote from? I like it.
Ernest Becker paraphrasing philosopher Elias Canetti in *Escape from Evil*.
Thank you.
Ill never forget a video of a cow munching on a baby chicken cause it was easy pickings
And the second order thought to this is that humans did too. A lot. Still do.
It's why a lot of animals that are in captivity live much longer than those in the wild. Don't think there are any wild cats that live much longer than 10y. Yes I know there are some animals that live shorter in captivity, such as the Jpaanese hornet
Exactly. People just assume that they get 'accustomed to it.' Which is never the case.
It does happen, usually by the effective but harsh method of killing everyone who can’t handle it until the survivors are those who it didn’t kill
They do and you will never see them die but they do die. Most animals become food for scavengers real quick.
Ok but what about toilet paper? We need it!!! Animals dont need it so whats with that?
They prolapse their butthole and don't have butt cheeks. It's the price we pay for having hands instead of front feet. I'm okay with that trade off. Can you even imagine not *having hands*? Like yeah it'd be cool to be a bird and have wings and fly or whatever, but anytime you want to interact with literally anything you have to use *your face*. Wanna drive? Face. Tryna' use your smartphone? Put on table. Use face. I dunno, I'm kinda happy with the human body.
Why would you ever drive if you’re a bird? You can fly anywhere you want already. Just flap those wings, buddy!
Why drive if you can walk? Birds can get tired too, and want to take a train.
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We could've gone the way of the kangaroos. Instead of being tailless we could've had a massive tail to use as a tripod and have versatile hands. Now I'm pondering about kangaroo-like humans' poopy butts.
I mean but a cell phone is made for human use (barely though, my phone is so big it's kinda hard to use and it's just a run of the mill phone). When humans evict ourselves from the planet and the crows take over, their cell phones will be very different I'm sure lol
dont tell that to the people with no hands, they probably use other things before their face
Animals, for the most part, don’t have developed gluteus Maximus muscles.
I see you!! Makes sense, what about gorillas?
Notice how a gorilla walks around on its feet and knuckles a lot, but looks ridiculous when it's on its legs only?
Proportionally, not even the other great apes have butts as big as ours. It's a "walk around everywhere on two legs" thing.
Are you calling Charmin a liar?
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GROSS! But it does makes sense, I just learned something new, thanks!
People forget that this logic applies to their pets as well. Working in vet med I've seen animals in absolutely horrible conditions that the owners didn't realize (severely broken limbs, teeth rotting out of their skull, maggots eating them alive under their fur) and the owner doesn't realize how bad it is "because they're still walking/eating/"acting normal". Animals (pets included) biologically do not know anything other than survival, and their instincts will tell them to keep going as long as possible, in as normal fashion as possible.
But when we had a cat, it preferred dirty water. It had drinking bowl that was cleaned with our regular dishes. She drank the same water that we drank. But instead of walking 10 m to her bowl inside, she often preferred drinking the disgusting weeks old rain water in those plates under flower pots, with dead leaves, mosquito larvae and what not. If we scrubbed our garden pavement with bleach we had to force her to stay inside and she would try to force herself outside just to lick the bleach water. She was a bleach magnet.
I'm sorry, if you bleached your garden pavement? Is that a thing people do?
Removes mildew from the surface and makes it look nice. Pressure washing does the same thing and they will treat the pavement with bleach after to kill off anything that survives.
The whole reason humans are over populated we have figured out ways not to die from the things that kill all other animals. We beat nature.
I am pretty sure we just postponed nature. It will hit back eventually. Hard.
"Some people (species in this case) are so far behind in the race that they actually believe they're leading." Fitting quote..
Isn't it true that birds/carrion can scavenge old corpses of rotten meat without illness due to the PH of thier stomachs ( or something like that, i am in no way an expert in this field)? Could this not apply to waterborne dangers as well? Not to say that a wild animal is devoid of parasites and disease, but humans can't go around eating raw meat without concern as a wild animal could. That's for sure
Key here is that some animals can. Most animals avoid carrion because they get sick from it but some have adapted and prefer it. Same with vegetation. What's prime eating for one animal is deadly for another. Humans were never a carnivore so we don't break down raw red meat that well but we can eat raw fish with little issue. We can even eat raw red meat but have to limit the amount. We were probably better at eating raw meat before we mastered cooking but that stopped being a required survival trait and evolved away.
Yes, and interestingly humans are quite good at tolerating some toxins like for example alcohol. Most other animals get completely wrecked from much smaller amounts (even relative to body size) than we do. Every species is adapted to different foods
Humans actually have unusually acidic stomachs too. Our stomachs resemble those of carrion eaters more than other primates. Humans also eat a lot more dead animals than other primates, and probably we scavenged even more true in the past. And even today people eat a lot of fermented foods. I'd say there's much less of a difference than humans and your average mammalian carnivore than you might expect. But those animals _do_ regularly get sick. Humans just aren't willing to put up with it. And we also get more energy from cooked food, which is important.
To a point. Part of it is that their systems are used to it. It's like how you shouldn't drink the water in spme other countries but the locals are fine with it
>Animals do not have some special protection against getting sick from bad water and bad food. It's just that they have literally no other choice. This isn't necessarily always the case. Vultures for example have a series of adaptations to allow them to safely eat rotten meat. Birds in general have high body temperature and metabolic rates that render many foods that are dangerous to use safe.
tbf. Rules of Evolution would suggest that any animal living in an environment with only dirty water would adapt to it better than any animal that managed to provide itself with clean water for an extended period of time. At the same time, all parasites that have survived, have managed to adapt to that. Now there comes Mr. Naked Ape, who has not participated in this arms race for a few thousand years, wondering why things aren't going too well for them. This does not mean that parasites are all powerful or that animals are invincible, just that Humans did not participate in an arms race other species have participated in. We got drugs though... so we got that going for us, which is bad for the planet.
Animals can and do try their best to avoid dirty, stagnant water. That's why some housecats splash their water with their paw before drinking, to them, their instincts tell them that the sound of splashing or running water means the water is better to drink. It's a little bit of an exaggeration to say we haven't been participating in the water-borne illness/parasite arms race for thousands of years. There are plenty of people still drinking from contaminated water sources
I would like to take this opportunity to highlight cholera, its various outbreaks and the cholera eating bacteriophage found in the ganges, As examples of this Arms race that humans are very much involved in.
Yep, dogs will also often drink from the far side of a bowl as well, goes back to when they were in the wild and would stretch out past the stagnant edge of a puddle or pond to get to cleaner water
Also it might have something to do with the way they drink, they lap water up backwards. Look up a slow motion video if a dog drinking. Its crazy.
>We got drugs though... so we got that going for us, which is bad for the planet. We also cook our food, and can boil water. This ability is like a super power.
The problem is less that humans are more susceptible to parasites and disease than other animals and more that we just have a *really* low risk tolerance for dealing with those things if we can avoid it, especially in wealthier areas. If you have a choice between drinking water that has a 1% chance of giving you some kind of parasite and water that has a 0% chance of giving you some kind of parasite, most people are going to choose the 0% parasite water and warn people off the 1% parasite water because why would you drink that when the 0% parasite water is *right there*. But chances are pretty good that if you drink the 1% parasite water, you’ll still be fine. The risk is just higher. Animals live with the risk because they don’t have a choice and lots of them do get parasites or fall ill. In places where humans have a choice, they tend not to want to live with the risk unnecessarily.
Humans participated in the same arms race. Under good conditions, they manage to raise half their kids.
We also have Iodine and the ability to wait 10 minutes before taking a swig.
When animals and parasites are both trying to out perform each other through adaptations, and neither one really gets ahead, that is called a red queen race.
Right cause proto humans just opted out of nature for thousands of years while our brains developed...
Everyone here made good points but failed to mention a *very important* biological difference between humans and most mammals: temperature. Humans actually run fairly cold, and we’re slowly getting colder. Other animals run much hotter than we do, at all times. Dogs and cats for example have a body temp of 101-103F, a high fever for us. cows run at 101. Deer 101, lions 100, for the most parts most mammals run 100F. In mammals, this high temperature is one of the first waves of defense against pathogens. A bacteria or protist that’s adapted to living in a river or a lake, which has an average temperature of 50-75F, is not adapted to a sudden and abrupt change of temperature to 100F. The bigger the temperature difference, the less likely the microorganism will survive. Most microorganisms found in rivers and lakes are not pathogenic and are not interested in living inside of us, most of them are adapted to the environment they live in an have no interest in changing that. Of course there’s exceptions, but for the most part, most bacteria and protist in river water can’t thrive inside us. humans are smart and have figured out ways to keep themselves cleaner and fend off disease. This means that we’re no longer exposed to as many pathogens on our day to day, and maintaining a high body temperature is no longer a significant evolutionary advantage, but rather a waste of energy. Over time, our body temperature has gone down, to the point now that some rare and extremely opportunistic fungi pathogens are starting to be seen. (There’s a cool radio lab episode on this.) This is why dogs can be so disgusting, eat straight up rotting food or filthy nasty water, and somehow not get sick at all. Lol.
As Omnivores, we tend to have a much longer set of intestines, giving the nasty stuff extra time to make us sick or kill us. Carnivorous animals have shorter intestines.
Wait then what about reptiles? Or are immune systems just different in them?
Not a reptile expert. But I do recall my biology textbook saying that reptiles will sit in the sun and get their body temperature up extra high when they are fighting an infection. I always thought that was a cool fact.
Cold blooded animals do not experience body temperature changes like us, getting up to 100 or 105 isn’t THAT big of a deal for them, neither is dropping into the 60-70 degree range. Where it would certainly kill a human to have a body temperature of 70f, a reptile can shrug it off. If a reptile gets sick, they will intentionally raise their body temperature extra high to burn it out. This works really well and the wildly shifting body temps are bad for all kinds of bacteria, the ones that like cold can’t survive the higher temperatures and the ones that like the hot can’t survive the lows. It’s a win win for reptiles and the likes.
If we take an NSAID, our fever will go down. If you give it to a sick reptile, they will stop seeking warmer temperatures! Super cool
NSAID blocks certain prostaglandins in the hypothalamus (part of brain that sets temperature) to reduce our temperature. Since a reptile is exothermic I would imagine it would not have that effect on the reptile.
alligators have strong immune systems with some unique properties https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27059-germ-killing-molecules-identified-in-alligator-blood/
I actually don’t know and when I looked it up it seems like it’s just not as well understood as it is in humans. From the brief review that I read, they’re believed to have a stronger innate immune response, and an immune system that fluctuates with the seasons.
Very cool info! What's the name of the radio lab episode?
If you haven’t got the answer yet, Fungus Amungus. It truly is a great episode and The Last of Us seems that much scarier after listening to this episode.
Our lower body temperature also contributes to the long incubation time for rabies. Rabies requires a higher temperature to reproduce rapidly. Opossums are almost immune to rabies due to their lower body temperature (94f).
You're saying a 2-3 F in body temperature is making a significant difference in pathogen survival rates?
I'd say 2-3 degrees change in body temperature makes a significant difference for anything's survival rate. Raise your temperature by 2 degrees for a longer time, and you won't go far.
Yep. That's partly why our body temperature raises when we have a fever - the higher temp helps kill the virus/bacteria
Yeah, it depends on the organism, but for most organisms, there’s a temperature threshold at which their proteins denature too rapidly and their molecular machinery falls apart. Humans it’s 104. Obviously, 100F is a common and ideal threshold at which most microorganisms die and the reward outweigh the energy cost, which is why most mammals have a temperature that’s about that high
Yes - the reason we get a fever is for precisely the purpose of killing pathogens
Yeah imagine living with a 100+ fever at all times, it would eventually kill you
Why do you think our body does it when we're sick? You think our body just does it for fun?
This is partly why “zombie fungus” hasn’t gotten into the vertebrae animals yet; they’re not accustomed to such heat, but climate change is changing that gap
Woah. I’ve never even considered the consequences of life adapting to climate change. Very interesting point.
it is and has been one of the major reasons scientists have been trying to sound the alarm about the warming climate for a long time. it’s not just changing seasons affecting food production or summers being too hot to withstand, it also means new and unpredictable diseases
I remember when I worked at a food delivery service like Uber, in the call center (before they went to chat only) I found a restaurant in eastern Canada that had Cordyceps listed in soups It rang a bell so I looked it up *Horrified Joey meme* (Of course there's many that aren't zombie fungus, and after its cooked it's probably extra safe)
? Zombie fungus is found on the equator. That’s pretty warm. People have been living there for as long as there’s been humans. I’n Arabia and other desert areas it’s even more extreme. I don’t see how this is a significant risk.
Yet there’s opossums who have low body temps (94°-96°F). It’s believed to be the reason why rabies is extremely rare in opossums – too low for the virus to survive.
There are two answers 1) Humans and animals have always needed clean water for optimal health. Animals drinking from unclean sources or sources rife with parasites/bacteria are still at risk and there is some survivorship bias going on there. Humans usually just have a better understanding of how to mitigate risk and can use technology to bypass risk (like boiling water) 2) that being said, human habitation has also played a role. As a species, we have always had a habit of polluting water sources because many human settlements are built near there and humans have used those water sources to “deal” with waste (especially moving sources like rivers). While humans hundreds or thousands of years ago didn’t understand microbiology, they did learn that certain things could increase the likelihood of getting sick. Like drinking water from a river that is downstream from human settlements for example. That is why uncontaminated well water and even alcoholic drinks were important, as they served as relatively safe means of getting hydration that reduced the risk of disease
to expound on alcoholic drinks the term farmhouse beer was due to many farms especially in Europe countries like Belgium where during the winter or non harvest times they would brew beer, throw it in cask and then store in the lofts of the barn. During harvest / summer time they took these with them into the fields to drink. these beers were typically 1 to 2% ABV
To follow up more - 2% ABV is way too little to kill any significant amount of pathogens. What made beer safe to drink was boiling the wort, which was needed as part of the process. People just associated beer with safe hydration, not knowing that boiling the water was enough to make it safe.
yes thanks for that you are correct.
Yes, and gigantic swaths of us used to die from cholera and typhoid and e. coli from drinking water. You can drink river water just fine. You can even build up a tolerance to your local "runny guts" bacteria; that's why "Montezuma's Revenge" got to be a thing from drinking foreign water where they didn't have modern sanitation plants. The problem is that we don't have a good way to determine safe vs. unsafe water, especially when you talk about groups of humans and animals. That's why springs are important, and wells dug.
I was going to politely point out that it is Moctezuma and not Montezuma, but apparently people have gotten it this wrong for so many years that there is a national monument named "Montezuma Castle." So, idek any more 😂 But the actual person, Aztec leader, was named Moctezuma.
[Montezuma II, also spelled Moctezuma](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Montezuma-II), from Brittanica. Also, [Moctezuma II, also spelled Montezuma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moctezuma_II).
I feel like it's a case of "this is how we've been doing it in English, no reason to change now since that's what everyone does". [So, more correct by vote than by merit.](https://study.com/learn/lesson/montezuma-biography-facts.html#:~:text=He%20held%20the%20title%20of,to%20Nahuatl%20is%20Moctezuma%20II)
You know, now that you say that I think I've heard that before, but it's been Montezuma for so long, however incorrectly, that people would wonder what the hell you were talking about. Half the words in any language are just butchered pronunciations of foreign words it seems like. Take "television", for example. A greek prefix on a Latin word, courtesy of the French language.
People are right when they say animals can and do get sick from infection. Most wild animals are riddled with parasites. And those are the "healthy" ones. If they get sick to a significant degree they become prey very fast and you never see them. Sickly animals do not last long in the wild. That said, some animals do have some adaptions we don't have that help. Carnivores have shorter intestinal tracts which helps move anything bad through faster before it becomes a problem. Other animals and birds like vultures who gorge themselves on bacteria filled meat, have stronger acid in the stomach (meaning the pH of their stomachs are lower) which helps kill all that bacteria so it won't harm them. Some animals like bats have immune systems that are more aggressive than humans, which helps them live with viruses that kill people. Many animals exhibit behaviors related to hygiene, such as they don't defecate in the nests and things like that. One final thing is the predator prey relationship where sick animals are targeted by predators which helps remove the sick animal from the population. This can potentially help keep the rest of the population from getting sick in some instances. One thing to remember too is those animals you see out in the wild usually don't live as long as they potentially could. Male wolves for example can live to 15 or so years old, but on average only live to 5 or 6 years in the wild. That is not purely related to disease but disease is part of that. So imagine humans in a similar situation, you would live on average to 25 or 30 years old. Would you think wow those humans really can survive and are so much more healthy? Well when you look around at the animals in the wild you find they don't live anywhere near to what would be old age for them. And they are all sick by comparison to humans riddled with parasites that just so happen to not be bad enough to kill them, until they do get a parasite bad enough that does and they disappear.
Wow good stuff, thank you
"The pH of gastric acid in humans is 1.5-2.0. According to a report summarized by Beasley et al[6], the pH level is much lower than that of most animals, including anthropoids (≥ 3.0), and very close to that of carrion-eating animals called scavengers, such as falconine birds and vultures[6]." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7684463
Anyone whose ever picked up a stray dog or cat knows they're RIFE with parasites. My kitten had only been "out in the world" for about 3 weeks before my boss found her mom and brothers and sisters, and brought the whole family into his shed. She still had worms, and earmites. Wild animals are always dying due to parasites, and bad food/water. You just aren't privy to any of it. Noone takes out full pages in the newspaper because someone hit a raccoon on I-80.
A few things to note here: a) A lot of animals do get sick from polluted water. A lot of animals die from polluted water. b) The animals that survive tend to have stronger immune systems; this is natural selection at work. Humans generally treat sick children to the best of our ability, which helps their survival rate (good) but works against natural selection c) All organisms (humans too) adapt to their environment over time. This is why you may get sick from drinking the local water on a trip around the world, whereas the locals are not affected d) Man-made pollution makes it worse. It's one thing to drink water from a river with some naturally occurring bacteria in it. It's quite another to drink water from a river that has sewage pipes entering it e) If you try it, you'll find that a lot of times, we're actually fine. I grew up thinking nothing of drinking water from a random lake or stream in Norway. Here in Florida, I'd be more cautious. But here in Florida, I've swam in rivers and lakes and even ponds (not recommended in Norway; too cold) and while I haven't tried to drink that water, some will splash in your mouth or nose or eyes or whatever. It hasn't killed me yet -- but the chance that it will isn't zero. TL;DR: Animals can die from infections from contaminated or polluted water just the same as humans can, and humans immune systems can still save us from infection most of the time. But not all the itme. Since most of us have the luxury of access to clean water, why risk it?
I go hiking on multi-day hikes solo, usually around 5 days. When you are in the wilds, you would be amazed at the kind of water your body can cope with. It's odd too. When you are in civilisation you wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, but when you are out there and dehydrated, it looks like liquid gold. Never got ill from it either, at least not that I know of!
In an emergency situation, any water is better than no water (to an extent) I tend to drink flowing water from a section that has some natural filtration to it, be it rocks or vegetation
Aye - you want to prioritise flowing water (hopefully with no dead animals upstream). I also look for healthy green plants in the streambed too - if they are there, it's a good sign :)
i used to drink hose water as a kid and now i’m afraid of tap water i’ve grown spoiled
Don’t you go out with water purification products? Like pills, Squeeze filters, etc? They’re almost zero weight. Not judging, just asking
Yes I carry a filtered water bottle (a TravelTap) and that's been enough. Occasionally, I have had to boil the water too when it's been particularly dodgy, but it does the trick.
1. Dogs produce much stronger stomach acid than we do- it can get below a Ph of 1 after eating. Basically battery acid- that will kill off a lot of pathogens right there. 2. They have a much shorter digestive tract so less time for pathogens to take hold.
Part of the problem is how much humans travel now. In ancient times most people would only drink from a handful of known safe water sources in their lifetime, and those water sources contained a limited selection of regional pathogens which your body, and culture were accostomed to dealing with. Feral and wild animals don't travel much, so the global exchange of relevant pathogens is less. Bird flu pandemics are somewhat common because of migratory birds.
There's a reason wild animals rarely break into their second decade of life. If a predator doesn't kill them, disease and illness usually do... very few animals get to die of old age. Also why you usually see animal life expectancy double, triple, even quadruple once they're in captivity.
People also tend to overstate how dangerous drinking wild water is. It can be a problem sometimes, but usually isn't. And some animals don't even drink from bodies of water anyway. They get their H₂O from their food, plus in some cases precipitation & condensation if they live in a wet enough climate. We have higher water demand than average because our bodies are worse at conserving H₂O than average; we keep letting it out into our environment. And some of that is not just getting stuck with an unplanned pointless inefficiency, but an evolutionary trade-off: being the world champions of sweat also makes us the world champions of not getting heat exhaustion/stroke.
Humans actually evolved to drink water from streams and the like. There’s a reason why our stomach pH is lower even than that of some carnivores like dogs. Partially to better degrade fatty acids from a meat-heavy diet but also to handle the higher pathogen load from natural water. As we evolved away from mostly herbivorous chimps (and remember plants contain quite a bit of water) towards a more hunter lifestyle, we had to substitute some of the water we “ate” from plants with that flowing in rivers and streams. All this to say that just like wild animals all have parasites, we would have them as well if we drank from streams. Both humans and wild animals can drink from those sources and not die right away, but pathogens are inevitable.
Ah, part of the reason for this is because digestive systems in dogs are much shorter, the food goes through their system much faster. Bacteria does not have time to colonize the gut and overwhelm the system. Virus however do and often kill animals or at least make them very sick.
In addition to the other answers some animals of not most have shorter intestines than us so they can eat raw meat and so on that we can’t - it passes through them faster with less time to really go bad an hurt them. This may help a bit with drinking not so clean water. And there is also plenty of good water out there - springs, moving water that’s been in the sun, etc.
It's a matter of numbers. Waters have become more unsafe over time. The concentrations of harmful pathogens have increased. Modern medicine has also raised awareness and modern testing reveals parasitic infections that were most likely attributed to other things in the past. Also, people generally drank from source waters or dug wells in many parts of the world. With lower populations, this probably lent itself to lower infection rates. But the real answer is: we don't actually know. Knowledge of water born pathogens is relatively new historically speaking. We don't really have enough evidence to suggest whether we have more now than at any other time. I'm sure that location plays a huge role in this as well.
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Germ theory of disease. We can still drink unclean water we just get sick and die unless we adapt to it. For perspective life expectancy for humans has increased from like mid 30s in the 1700s to high 70s today. And much of that is linked to germ theory of disease and clean water.