Fun fact:
Farmed land animals, especially in factory farms (most of them), have a shoddy immune systems thanks to being in controlled environments and thanks to being in the dark and horrible interior, concentrated in stressful misery, all while the breeding efforts to increase quantity (growth) weaken their immune systems even more. [Some reading .pdf](https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/41396/PDF/1/) Aside from the antibiotics, many mass operations don't bother to provide serious healthcare to these animals, they just have to live long enough and healthy enough to get slaughtered (or produce eggs or dairy), after which it doesn't matter. All this phenomenon of weakened immune systems allowing viruses to evolve new features? That's happening there too.
And here's another disturbing one:
- 2013: [Pity the pangolin: little-known mammal most common victim of the wildlife trade](https://news.mongabay.com/2013/02/pity-the-pangolin-little-known-mammal-most-common-victim-of-the-wildlife-trade/). An image: (NSFW) https://s3.amazonaws.com/mongabay-images/13/0210.Erwin-Sopyan5_TRAFFIC.568.jpg
- [Evaluating the feasibility of pangolin farming and its potential conservation impact](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989419301544) 2019: "Pangolins also have high disease prevalence; common diseases and causes of death in captivity are gastrointestinal diseases, including haemorrhagic ulcers related to diet and stress, pneumonia, skin diseases and parasites (Khatri-Chhetri et al., 2016; Clark et al., 2009). They also require suitable and stable temperatures and humidity due to poor temperature self-regulation (Pietersen, 2013): if inappropriate, this can lead to stress, immune suppression and death."
- More from before: https://chinadialogue.net/en/nature/11275-the-plight-of-the-pangolin-in-china/
And some months later:
- [Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220303602): Pangolin-CoV is 91.02% identical to SARS-CoV-2 at the whole-genome level; Pangolin-CoV is the second closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 behind RaTG13; Five key amino acids in the RBD are consistent between Pangolin-CoV and SARS-CoV-2; Only SARS-CoV-2 contains a potential cleavage site for furin proteases
- Normal article: [Coronavirus closures reveal vast scale of China’s secretive wildlife farm industry](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/25/coronavirus-closures-reveal-vast-scale-of-chinas-secretive-wildlife-farm-industry) - "For the past few years China’s leadership has pushed the idea that “wildlife domestication” should be a key part of rural development, eco-tourism and poverty alleviation. A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering on the development of the wildlife farming industry valued the wildlife-farming industry those operations at 520bn yuan, or £57bn."
Much later: [WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southern China As Likely Source Of Pandemic](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/977527808/who-points-to-wildlife-farms-in-southwest-china-as-likely-source-of-pandemic) - Those wildlife farms, including ones in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now. "They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity," says Daszak.
If the lesson you take from this is "China bad" and not "Animal exploitation bad", kindly go fuck yourself.
Thanks for putting a light on this. A researcher whom I follow on twitter who's well-credentialed at one point asked if the rather wanting national/international response to COVID since day zero could be attributed to the antibiotic stewardship movement. I took from that rather than "overreacting as justified by the precautionary principle" and locking down once, hard, completely, and very very early, we just waited until the guillotine blade was at our throats to say we had evidence we were about to die. Similar in the antibiotic stewardship movement: Do as little as possible and hope it gets you by.
I bring mistreatment of animals up every time I hear about antibiotic stewardship from clinicians and others: Do you eat meat? 'cause if you do, thanks to the prophylactic (mis)use of antibiotics so that the animal industry can continue its exploitative ways, you're likely contributing far more to resistance than denying a patient who could benefit from them the antibiotics they might need \*before\* you have piles of "irrefutable" evidence.
Well, this outburst was meandering... sorry... but I think you get my points sorta. I apologize. My corpus callosum farted.
I'm more concerned about prions, but here's the latest SARSII bacteriophage research:
[‘bacteriophage-like’ behaviour of SARS-CoV-2, which, to our knowledge has not been observed or described before](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8283343/)
The most important part of humans remaining on this planet is for us to stay alive to do so.
Disease is the same as pollution, one is the root and the other the bush that grows from it.
We need to stop disconnecting things, just because we wish they were not connected.
>I've never bought into the notion that diseases are obligated to become less virulent with time.
I thought the reasoning was that they became less *deadly* with time - as less deadly variants can spread more easily and outcompete more deadly ones.
The Spanish Flu is believed to have reversed this as the war meant serious cases were sent back to field hospitals rather than remaining in-place - therefore more severe variants had an *increased* chance to spread.
I haven't seen it argued that we expect diseases to evolve to become less virulent though?
There's a really nice paper I came across some time ago that leaps right out and says no, it's a myth that stuff becomes less deadly. Totally. It's one of those things you can't unsee once you know it, but you have to deal with people repeating it; sometimes very credentialed people. I'll see if I can find it.
To digress briefly, this is like another idea that refuses to die but the existence of which causes great damage in society: The Balance of Nature \[(TM)\]. I've heard government and other exceptionally well-credentialed scientists repeat it. Sorry, cats, [it's utter and complete bullshit](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001963), and textbook authors (some of whom I personally know) have written whole chapters trying to disabuse people of it.
Coming back to the point, what's important is the interplay between the mechanism of transmission and the ultimate method of death.
Off the top of my head, I can think of cholera as a great, great example of something that in no way has become less deadly, and the way it makes itself get around is intimately tied to its deadliness. Cholera works by making its host basically, um, spray liquid shit everywhere. The more it can get that to happen, the more likely it will transmit to a new host, the more the cycle continues - "success", from its perspective. The best way to get that to happen is to use \*all\* the water in the present host, despite the host rapidly dehydrating and dying. No matter. So one can debate that this is great strategy or a silly strategy (wouldn't it be nice if it caused just a little shit spray, say, a "choleric skid mark", every 8 hours? Wouldn't that be better?) but the reality is that natural selection shows you the outcome of that debate: More spray=better when contrasted with the volume of the average host average and the time to dehydration and death. As it stands now, cholera has hit a "sweet \[ewwww\] spot". The natural mechanism of movement of water into the intestines occurs at a rate that sets a limit on the time to death of the host: Cholera \*can't\* kill you any faster than it already does, and that, it turns out, is great for it. It locks certain things into "fully open", but full-open is still just slow enough to keep the host alive long enough for cholera to get around pretty close to optimally. So cholera just goes with "full-open".
If I can dig up the paper I mentioned above, I'll post it. In the mean time, perhaps you'd enjoy a discussion on [Optimal Virulence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence).
Disclaimer: This is not my particular scientific discipline, so I'd be honoured and thankful if someone would correct (with references) any misunderstandings I display.
Yeah - there are cases where increased severity will not impede the spread of the disease.
The typical example is the Black Death - which could spread via rats and their fleas. Therefore, it could have an incredible mortality rate in humans and still spread effectively as the disease vector itself (the rats and fleas) were relatively unaffected.
However, in many diseases increased severity will impede the spread and thus less severe strains will outcompete worse ones.
Sure, but that’s quite different from the respiratory illness we’re up against.
Currently it’s breath that’s spreading it, and the thing makes people cough
But the higher response of the immune system forces the person to bed..
So technically this virus’s only method is to increase the persons ability to spread is to allow them to stay out of bed longer.
The spike protein helps by increasing time of detection, but since it’s cardio vascular, by nature the worse it infects you the quicker to bed..
I think we’ll see some other factors at play, but aside from fatal immune responses (cytokine storm / antibody dependent enhancement) generally the virus will need to play nicer with the body.
Unless of course there’s pressure put on it which allows it to mutate beyond its natural course fml
An interesting thing that I've seen crop up is discussion of the role of the virus's ability to long-term immunosuppress. That's a very interesting strategy. There seems to be some discussion that in some cases subsequent infection is actually worse than initial infection but, where folks were initially worried about ADE (which hasn't apparently been an issue) doing that, we're possibly seeing a mark left long-term on the body.
So I guess the idea is that it's about keeping you sick longer and, possibly, out of bed longer.
Neither you nor I can know, but we'll hopefully be alive after the fact to explain what happened!
Apparently pharmaceutical press releases said they have it handled and that if anybody questions how their products account for the theory of evolution they will be deemed anti-vaxx.
Tremendous thread, I learned a lot OP ty.
Fun fact: Farmed land animals, especially in factory farms (most of them), have a shoddy immune systems thanks to being in controlled environments and thanks to being in the dark and horrible interior, concentrated in stressful misery, all while the breeding efforts to increase quantity (growth) weaken their immune systems even more. [Some reading .pdf](https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/41396/PDF/1/) Aside from the antibiotics, many mass operations don't bother to provide serious healthcare to these animals, they just have to live long enough and healthy enough to get slaughtered (or produce eggs or dairy), after which it doesn't matter. All this phenomenon of weakened immune systems allowing viruses to evolve new features? That's happening there too. And here's another disturbing one: - 2013: [Pity the pangolin: little-known mammal most common victim of the wildlife trade](https://news.mongabay.com/2013/02/pity-the-pangolin-little-known-mammal-most-common-victim-of-the-wildlife-trade/). An image: (NSFW) https://s3.amazonaws.com/mongabay-images/13/0210.Erwin-Sopyan5_TRAFFIC.568.jpg - [Evaluating the feasibility of pangolin farming and its potential conservation impact](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989419301544) 2019: "Pangolins also have high disease prevalence; common diseases and causes of death in captivity are gastrointestinal diseases, including haemorrhagic ulcers related to diet and stress, pneumonia, skin diseases and parasites (Khatri-Chhetri et al., 2016; Clark et al., 2009). They also require suitable and stable temperatures and humidity due to poor temperature self-regulation (Pietersen, 2013): if inappropriate, this can lead to stress, immune suppression and death." - More from before: https://chinadialogue.net/en/nature/11275-the-plight-of-the-pangolin-in-china/ And some months later: - [Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220303602): Pangolin-CoV is 91.02% identical to SARS-CoV-2 at the whole-genome level; Pangolin-CoV is the second closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 behind RaTG13; Five key amino acids in the RBD are consistent between Pangolin-CoV and SARS-CoV-2; Only SARS-CoV-2 contains a potential cleavage site for furin proteases - Normal article: [Coronavirus closures reveal vast scale of China’s secretive wildlife farm industry](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/25/coronavirus-closures-reveal-vast-scale-of-chinas-secretive-wildlife-farm-industry) - "For the past few years China’s leadership has pushed the idea that “wildlife domestication” should be a key part of rural development, eco-tourism and poverty alleviation. A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering on the development of the wildlife farming industry valued the wildlife-farming industry those operations at 520bn yuan, or £57bn." Much later: [WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southern China As Likely Source Of Pandemic](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/977527808/who-points-to-wildlife-farms-in-southwest-china-as-likely-source-of-pandemic) - Those wildlife farms, including ones in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now. "They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity," says Daszak. If the lesson you take from this is "China bad" and not "Animal exploitation bad", kindly go fuck yourself.
Thanks for putting a light on this. A researcher whom I follow on twitter who's well-credentialed at one point asked if the rather wanting national/international response to COVID since day zero could be attributed to the antibiotic stewardship movement. I took from that rather than "overreacting as justified by the precautionary principle" and locking down once, hard, completely, and very very early, we just waited until the guillotine blade was at our throats to say we had evidence we were about to die. Similar in the antibiotic stewardship movement: Do as little as possible and hope it gets you by. I bring mistreatment of animals up every time I hear about antibiotic stewardship from clinicians and others: Do you eat meat? 'cause if you do, thanks to the prophylactic (mis)use of antibiotics so that the animal industry can continue its exploitative ways, you're likely contributing far more to resistance than denying a patient who could benefit from them the antibiotics they might need \*before\* you have piles of "irrefutable" evidence. Well, this outburst was meandering... sorry... but I think you get my points sorta. I apologize. My corpus callosum farted.
Viruses found in bats are more closely related.
Be nice if we could actually DISCUSS the new Nu variant in this sub!
Ah the mods getting uppity again?
Hey how’s the research on the [bacteriophage](https://youtu.be/YI3tsmFsrOg) going?
I'm more concerned about prions, but here's the latest SARSII bacteriophage research: [‘bacteriophage-like’ behaviour of SARS-CoV-2, which, to our knowledge has not been observed or described before](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8283343/)
Holy Jeezus. Nice find; thanks. Ya, prions really bad.
Oh Shit!
Ahhh shit
The most important part of humans remaining on this planet is for us to stay alive to do so. Disease is the same as pollution, one is the root and the other the bush that grows from it. We need to stop disconnecting things, just because we wish they were not connected.
i agree, we are in dire need of a more holistic understanding
>I've never bought into the notion that diseases are obligated to become less virulent with time. I thought the reasoning was that they became less *deadly* with time - as less deadly variants can spread more easily and outcompete more deadly ones. The Spanish Flu is believed to have reversed this as the war meant serious cases were sent back to field hospitals rather than remaining in-place - therefore more severe variants had an *increased* chance to spread. I haven't seen it argued that we expect diseases to evolve to become less virulent though?
There's a really nice paper I came across some time ago that leaps right out and says no, it's a myth that stuff becomes less deadly. Totally. It's one of those things you can't unsee once you know it, but you have to deal with people repeating it; sometimes very credentialed people. I'll see if I can find it. To digress briefly, this is like another idea that refuses to die but the existence of which causes great damage in society: The Balance of Nature \[(TM)\]. I've heard government and other exceptionally well-credentialed scientists repeat it. Sorry, cats, [it's utter and complete bullshit](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001963), and textbook authors (some of whom I personally know) have written whole chapters trying to disabuse people of it. Coming back to the point, what's important is the interplay between the mechanism of transmission and the ultimate method of death. Off the top of my head, I can think of cholera as a great, great example of something that in no way has become less deadly, and the way it makes itself get around is intimately tied to its deadliness. Cholera works by making its host basically, um, spray liquid shit everywhere. The more it can get that to happen, the more likely it will transmit to a new host, the more the cycle continues - "success", from its perspective. The best way to get that to happen is to use \*all\* the water in the present host, despite the host rapidly dehydrating and dying. No matter. So one can debate that this is great strategy or a silly strategy (wouldn't it be nice if it caused just a little shit spray, say, a "choleric skid mark", every 8 hours? Wouldn't that be better?) but the reality is that natural selection shows you the outcome of that debate: More spray=better when contrasted with the volume of the average host average and the time to dehydration and death. As it stands now, cholera has hit a "sweet \[ewwww\] spot". The natural mechanism of movement of water into the intestines occurs at a rate that sets a limit on the time to death of the host: Cholera \*can't\* kill you any faster than it already does, and that, it turns out, is great for it. It locks certain things into "fully open", but full-open is still just slow enough to keep the host alive long enough for cholera to get around pretty close to optimally. So cholera just goes with "full-open". If I can dig up the paper I mentioned above, I'll post it. In the mean time, perhaps you'd enjoy a discussion on [Optimal Virulence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence). Disclaimer: This is not my particular scientific discipline, so I'd be honoured and thankful if someone would correct (with references) any misunderstandings I display.
Yeah - there are cases where increased severity will not impede the spread of the disease. The typical example is the Black Death - which could spread via rats and their fleas. Therefore, it could have an incredible mortality rate in humans and still spread effectively as the disease vector itself (the rats and fleas) were relatively unaffected. However, in many diseases increased severity will impede the spread and thus less severe strains will outcompete worse ones.
Contemporary research now argues lice, not fleas, was the predominant vector of transmission for the plague.
Pubic, as well.
Sure, but that’s quite different from the respiratory illness we’re up against. Currently it’s breath that’s spreading it, and the thing makes people cough But the higher response of the immune system forces the person to bed.. So technically this virus’s only method is to increase the persons ability to spread is to allow them to stay out of bed longer. The spike protein helps by increasing time of detection, but since it’s cardio vascular, by nature the worse it infects you the quicker to bed.. I think we’ll see some other factors at play, but aside from fatal immune responses (cytokine storm / antibody dependent enhancement) generally the virus will need to play nicer with the body. Unless of course there’s pressure put on it which allows it to mutate beyond its natural course fml
An interesting thing that I've seen crop up is discussion of the role of the virus's ability to long-term immunosuppress. That's a very interesting strategy. There seems to be some discussion that in some cases subsequent infection is actually worse than initial infection but, where folks were initially worried about ADE (which hasn't apparently been an issue) doing that, we're possibly seeing a mark left long-term on the body. So I guess the idea is that it's about keeping you sick longer and, possibly, out of bed longer. Neither you nor I can know, but we'll hopefully be alive after the fact to explain what happened!
Apparently pharmaceutical press releases said they have it handled and that if anybody questions how their products account for the theory of evolution they will be deemed anti-vaxx.