Adam Savage's podcast Still Untitled did a really fantastic episode [1] back around Halloween 2018 where they had a molecular biologist come on and talk about his work. The stories he tells are absolutely fascinating and I thoroughly encourage everyone wiht any interest in molecular biology and crazy stories to check it out.
I won't go into it because I'll spoil it, but suffice it to say that normal episodes are 20-30 mins, this one went for 70 mins and the first time I listened to it I immediately restarted it to listen to it again. The first half of the episode is a story that gets more and more insane as it unfolds. Afterwards, he goes into a few other shorter stories of his work.
Anyway, the link to this is because there's one story from about 38:15 to about 45 minutes in that discusses brain-eating amoebas he was involved in. It's not this exact one, but it's related to it. I recommend anyone who finds this interesting to check it out.
Although there's video on youtube, you really don't need video for it and your podcast app of choice should have an audio version of it.
Just watched that, thanks, it was fascinating. I'm sort of confused though -- didn't this guy basically prove that the carrier for Ebola could very well be reptiles and specifically Boa constrictors? The wikipedia on Ebola mentions bats and monkeys, no mention of Boas at all!
Semi off topic: I used to think that I have a chronic cold. But apparently I was getting sick from my dust mite allergy. An anti inflammatory drug really did wonders for me.
Is it same as every morning waking up with mucus in the throat? Kinda thick/hard - sometimes it flings out when I cough it out. Doctors have me had samples tested but there was no infection. So they just write 10 days Allegra (and a month saline water spray 3-4 times a day) and that's it. But it keeps happening. Been happening since last 2 years.
And then almost nothing the whole day except this feeling remains that something's there in the throat but rarely anything comes out - sometimes some semi-mucus (?) (or just spit - white but slightly thicker than spit - comes out)
There is a condition called “perennial rhinitis”, which is basically caused by house dust mite allergy, and can cause many of these symptoms. Many people who have that benefit from using inhaled corticosteroids, like fluticasone 50mcg per puff, which are available without prescription in the United States. The starting dose is usually 2 puffs each nostril once daily, and people who find it helps usually find it takes at least one or two weeks of regular use before their symptoms improve or resolve, and if they stop taking it, their symptoms return in a few weeks. So it’s a treatment, not a cure! If it’s not available over the counter wherever you live, maybe discuss it with your doctor?
Thank you. I will definitely talk to my doctor. Thing is they are so overloaded that any attempt to get an appointment have been politely discouraged as it's not a serious condition (and as far as I can see it is not really; not yet at least).
Also, since it's steroids (speaking as a layman) is it not like something that has lots of side effects? So a daily usage over prolonged periods of time may be undesirable?
The last doctor had also found out (after a CT scan) DNS and when he tried to inset a tiny camera up my nostrils he was not able to do so in one of them (that's when he suggested CT scan).
And my nose rarely runs. I mean it does little bit maybe couple of times a month when I catch common cold but on the daily basis it just doesn't. Also, what kind of specialist should I be approaching? The last doctor I saw was in Otorhinolaryngology. But that was more than a year ago - since then there's been nothing done related to it.
I have that, and there are some places I just cannot stay at. So when I know I'm going to be staying at a place where I get severe allergic reaction, I get some corticosteroid nasal spray, but the ones that are powerful.
A friend of mine has severe allergies to many different airborne materials, to the point where he was having to get shots every few weeks to control them. What finally allowed him to get control over the allergies and not have to get shots anymore was one of these nasal sprays.
Here's an explanation that has nothing to do with allergies. It might be cerebrospinal fluid leaking through your nose.
People can live like that forever without any issues. Linked to increased intracranial pressure, empty or partial sella, headaches that improve when laying down.
I had that, had trouble breathing every night, thought it was allergies, rinsed my nose but still every morning woke up with mucus in nose and throat. Metallic taste in mouth.
Only when I started powerlifting and got the headaches, doctors did an MRI, found empty sella, protrusions of brain tissue in sinuses and a quick procedure relieved me of my yearlong miseries that accompany the clogging.
I wake up feeling as fresh as when I was 10 years old.
In addition to the other allergies people mentioned; I'll add mold / black mold.
Adding a HEPA air filter to your bedroom might help.
Washing all your bedding in hot water with allergy safe detergent; mattress protector; deep clean carpets; and always showering before bed would reduce pollen / mite activity.
A few over-the-counter supplements you might try:
* Mucinex D - an expectorant; common name 'guaifenesin'.
* NAC 'N-acetyl cysteine' - an amino acid - loosens mucus, among other benefits.
I used to have this, but when I finally realized that I couldn’t run anymore due to knees I switched to outdoor biking and this problem got under control using mini doses of Zyrtec (I used to take daily fill doses). Not sure why it got better with the cycling.
So this phenomenon is recent. ~1.5 years. Coincidentally. Till 3 years ago I used to be a long distance runner (and daily 6-10km on an average) and used to trek and swim regularly. That gradually stopped to a halt. But then I had added daily sports to my routine.
I will try HEPA filter in my bedroom (can't do it for the entire house - it's quite big, open, and a shared apartment and not designed in that way really)
Not even regular coffee/tea other than occasional green/oolong/chamomile. Liquor even more in frequent. Normal rice/wheat based food with veggies and lentils on a regular basis. Occasional dairy and meat products. Yes, I do have eggs almost everyday (since almost as long I can remember).
It's a more recent (~1.5 years) phenomenon and I am in early 30s. Before this it just didn't happen at all and suddenly it became a daily thing.
These days I find if it's not something antibiotics or steroids can fix you just get deposited on a conveyor belt of specialists that recommend you to the next specialist.
Fluticasone changed my life, didn’t need allergy tablets, as it attacked the source.
Any generic brand works, just realize it takes like 10 days to start working, so be patient. Use as little as possible, so I recommend starting with 1 spray a day.
I mean the allergy tablets are attacking the source which is the allergic reaction just not very effectively. Fluticasone is very effectively and directly treating the symptom which is inflamed tissue in the nasal passage.
Anecdotes from my personal peanut gallery: Presumably after undergoing several adversarial attempts at amateur facial reconstruction in my earlier years, I've since endured persistent sinusoidal mysery, most notably an unreasonable susceptibility to colds. I tried many rational things which failed. However, it has been a (probably) irrational concoction that I've settled on, for 5 years now. A squeeze bottle of inert saline solution is thusly squozen and drip-fed a clean, high quality Lugol's solution (liquid iodine). At times, an essential oil is added too, eg peppermint, but rarely. At the risk of excessive iodine intake, my sinuses are now tolerable. Having doubts about this plebeian prescription, I encountered in my cursory research a patent by a prominent pharmaceutical company which consisted of the same recipe, but specifically for the "decolonization" of MRSA from the nasal passages. Considering that many folks now sport MRSA in their nasal passages, perhaps there's something to it. I've yet to settle on a suitable biofilm disruptor, but manuka honey is on my list.
If anyone is reckless enough to do the same, please thoroughly research the dangers of excessive iodine first. It is easy to err.
I had a persistent mrsa infection. Manuka honey worked better than prescription topicals. There are studies about the use of it for mrsa.
I never tried it deep in the nose though, only lower nostril. So it could still be higher up. But it hasn’t colonized the lower areas for years. Had it for 5+ years before realizing what it was.
Did you find that a UMF or MGO rating was important and if so, what was it? A lot of the manuka honey I see is quite low, and the few with higher ratings certainly reflect it in the pricing.
To be honest I’m not sure. I bought this medical grade manuka honey. That seems to be a thing, and it is sterilized for wound use.
Mind you I have no way of knowing if this is actual medical grade stuff that use in hospitals. But it seemed to work. On multiple mrsa outbreaks too: I had a few instances where it got outside the nose and this got rid of them.
What exactly are you doing with it? I wasn’t quite clear on how you’re going to get it deeper into the nose. I had had the mrsa in the lower nostril so I just used a q tip, but I didn’t get it into the nasal passages. (Nor do I know if it’s meant for such use). I also have congestion at night so I;m interested.
I will say that a jar like this lasts for many uses. If you’re eating honey it’s a small amount, but you don’t need much for topical use.
I would be irrigating the sinuses with it, diluted in warm (distilled!) saline water. I've done this with regular raw honey and haven't been too tempted since.
I am so trying that. I have to blow my nose quite often everyday and my nasal passages get frequently blocked especially when lying down trying to sleep. Fortunately, mucinex can fix that allowing me to sleep but fixing the source sounds better.
Agree with your method of boiling the water for a longer period of time, but this doesn’t have much to do with handling milk.
You generally don’t want to bring milk to a boil as it creates a film on top and modifies the taste. Instead, you heat it to 162F / 72C to kill the bacteria and cool it down as quickly as possibly. There isn’t a “traditional” method going back generations, since it was only in the 1860s when Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization.
You are totally right, but for the milk you just bring it to boil and stop. Quickly, 3 times in a row.
We know very well that you theoretically just need to cross the 68°C boundary to cook the proteins of the bacteria.
But if like me you happen to have been raised where the family had cows, you also know very well that in the morning at 4am, you do not play Pasteur. You want fast and secure.
As far as I know the solution used for sinus rinses is isotonic to the cells. Although I'm not sure if those microbes need the same salt content as humans (0.9%), but I would presume so.
If you double the isotonic solutions, don’t they become hypertonic? The instructions that came with my Nasopure say to use two packets for a hypertonic solution.
And right when I was thinking that "that thing survives boiling????" And how about washing machines and dishwashers? They tend to raise the water temperature to 60°C (depending on selection) and there is always detergent included.
> Urine therapy is an alternative medicine with zero scientific evidence to support any beneficial claims.
Yes. There is zero evidence to support any of its claims, nobody should do that. I just was pointing out that it exists, that it is a thing as an answer to the parent comment.
Well, science reports some uses. Urea is used in some skin care creams. It acts as a moisturing and mild exfoliant. I hope they use only synthetic urea for that in any case.
It mentions positive tests for n. fowleri genetic material from the splash pad storage tank, from a nearby fire hydrant and from the hose storage bin at the deceased's home. Understand that this is not the same as discovering viable organisms in the water supply.
It would be difficult, though not impossible, for these organisms to survive the water treatment processes, including the final disinfection step. It is possible, if disinfection malfunctioned at the water plant.
If the treatment processes were working properly, one could still expect positive tests for genetic material for a variety of bacteria and viruses, but that would only indicate that they were present in the raw water source, not that they were viable organisms in the water supply.
A child died. It is important to try to discover the source of this tragedy. The people in this community are scared and suspicious of their drinking water. I hope the investigation uncovers the probable cause quickly.
N. fowleri is difficult to contract but it's often fatal when it happens.
This is the least of their problems. LJ is between Houston and Corpus, which is a weather events, floods, and industrial petrochem disaster area. Honestly, it would be better long-term to relocate residents who are in the paths of increasingly-powerful and numerous hurricanes to the northwest rather than taxpayers subsidizing time-and-time again the stupidity of allowing people to build and rebuild neighborhoods in flood plains and right next to oil refineries. Climate change.
Have you ever lived here? It's clear you have _zero_ knowledge of the area.
What about SF or Seattle? The bay area is non-stop superfund sites, and unlike the gulf coast, there's _zero_ involvement from the companies that created the mess. Here, we have a few, but with _heavy_ mitigation from the companies involved. Y'all have absurd earthquake, fire, landslide, and drought risk.
Let's turn that around... How about: "Evacuate the west coast. No one should be allowed to live in California, Oregon, or Washington. It's just a drain on taxpayers."
I dunno, it does seem reasonable to me. Including your (albeit too wide) statement.
I refuse to live in a flood plain. Why would you? Not only do i not want my house to be destroyed, but the insurance alone is a good incentive to not live there.
If fire repeatedly pops up in my neighborhood i'll do the same thing, move. Why wouldn't you?
If the insurance would be insane because statistically it's likely to repeatedly happen why should taxpayers fund that sinkhole? I'm normally super liberal with taxes, but there has to be a balance. I believe in "free" healthcare, but we can't promote bad health patterns, as it would be a needless drain on the healthcare costs. Likewise i'd support taxpayers covering these types of disasters, but if you know the area is insanely prone to disasters why should the taxpayers fund it?
You're playing the victim card too hard mate. I get your point, but i don't think it's a "region bigot" issue here. Yes, people should move out of fire prone areas, why on earth would you think otherwise?
By the logic you'd have to use to claim all of this area is "in a flood plain and uninhabitable", you'd have to apply the same to virtually every other city in the US.
The flood plains mostly aren't inhabited here. (Yes, there are some exceptions.)
The area isn't what everyone seems to think it is.
I'm not talking about any specific location. Just the idea that it's some bigoted idea to say that, if year after year an area is burned to the ground, we shouldn't spend taxpayers dollars to fund a disaster area.
If insurance can calculate costs and decide what is too expensive to insure, we can too. That's all.
Yeah, but the original was _very_ much targeted at a specific region.
First off, the idea that this entire area is all in a floodplain or is repeatedly being rebuilt is just plain false. It ain't. End of story.
The bigotry comment is due to the history of the region. Flood control has historically been used to forcibly evict black communities, particularly along the gulf coast. Its a bit of a dog whistle here.
Yes, I'm a white guy. Yes, I'm still bringing it up.
Ever notice how it's only the majority non-white cities people are calling for forcibly evicting everyone from? Case in point: Houston, but not Galveston or Corpus Christi. New Orleans but not Baton Rouge or Covington.
Ever notice how it's the poorest communities that are at risk of losing their land, and not the wealthy-but-equally-flood-prone communities next door? (E.g. no one's saying "force people out of Katy", they're saying "force people out of the third ward")
Maybe you don't, but here, it's a big deal.
Historically, that same argument (it'd be better for everybody if no one lives there) is at the heart of a lot of egregious behavior by local and state governments (mostly local).
It's the reason people were _so_ pissed off about the arguments that big swaths of New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt. It's why "we will rebuild" was such a rallying cry.
And it's why targeting the main African American population center in the state specifically (Houston -- I'm not talking about Lake Jackson in this, as I don't know it that well.) and falsely claiming it's flooding all the time and constantly having to be rebuilt at taxpayer expense tends to provoke a strong response here.
(small preface: a lot of my replies to your comments are not intended to be combative or smug, but i fear they may come off as such. Apologies. I don't intend it, but i'm also too tired to rewrite. So fair warning :)
> Flood control has historically been used to forcibly evict black communities, particularly along the gulf coast. Its a bit of a dog whistle here.
To what end? I'm not disputing you here because frankly i have completely zero idea - but i struggle to even understand the assumed motivation. Evict black communities from their home, but then later let them return (as most evacuations are temporary)?
Or is eviction different than evacuation here? Do they kick out the black communities calling the area unsafe, then move white communities in? Seems bizarre, but i'm often quite abstracted and puzzled by racist behavior. Again, not disputing, merely questioning.
> Ever notice how it's only the majority non-white cities people are calling for forcibly evicting everyone from? Case in point: Houston, but not Galveston or Corpus Christi. New Orleans but not Baton Rouge or Covington.
I really haven't, but this isn't something i pay attention to. I certainly wouldn't have read someones comment about forcibly evicting someone to assume they wanted to then, later, move white folks in.
> Ever notice how it's the poorest communities that are at risk of losing their land, and not the wealthy-but-equally-flood-prone communities next door? (E.g. no one's saying "force people out of Katy", they're saying "force people out of the third ward")
I'd be in favor of this situation if the state/taxes were paying for the "third ward", but less so Katy. Rich folks tend to live in nice areas, regardless of how much of a risk that area was in before money moved in.
Which isn't to say that taxpayers didn't _also_ cover the rich folks. I'm just saying i wouldn't immediately assume rich areas need tax payers to have their homes protected from floods. And, i'm generally against tax payers helping constant flood areas. Seems a waste of resources.
> Historically, that same argument (it'd be better for everybody if no one lives there) is at the heart of a lot of egregious behavior by local and state governments (mostly local).
Plenty of things have been used to commit horrible things - i don't see that as an argument of the idea being inherently bad. You can do good or bad with just about any tool/power.
You may be correct, but does it make living in Tornado Alley (or w/e random example) any more safe? Any less of a burden on the taxpayer? I'd imagine not.
> And it's why targeting the main African American population center in the state specifically (Houston -- I'm not talking about Lake Jackson in this, as I don't know it that well.) and falsely claiming it's flooding all the time and constantly having to be rebuilt at taxpayer expense tends to provoke a strong response here.
That seems perfectly fair. With all of this said, i haven't changed my view, but i imagine we agree more than disagree. Since i'm not making, imo, any grand exclamations. Merely saying that we shouldn't live in areas that cost too much to be worth it.
I know very, very little about the New Orleans incident, rebuild, etc. It just seems foolish to build a house on sand, is all.
By "eviction" here, I mean permanently not being able to return to your home, regardless of the exact mechanism.
Historically, the evictions are eminent domain. There's no returning. The local government simply forces you off your property, nominally paying you something, but often pennies on the dollar. At a broad brush, national-level, this is a good start: https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=756342 I'll try to find some gulf-coast specific historical summaries in a bit.
The land usually then gets sold, often to developers. Here, the rationale is "flood control". Elsewhere it's "urban renewal". The end result is the same: "You can't stay here. Go to some other state/county".
Next, there's development. The real culprit in a lot of urban flooding is more urbanization than climate change. When you pave over more and more of the watershed, water reaches the streams more quickly. This leads to more flash floods, as more water reaches the trunk stream quickly (or reaches a drain that can't handle the volume in a lot of cases). Zoning doesn't help with this much. Buildings, roads, and parking lots just don't slow down and trap water the way trees and winding bayous do.
The main issue is that the poor communities are in the lower-lying / downstream areas, usually. Development happens upstream / in higher areas. Places downstream that _never_ flooded before now flood multiple times a year, because everything upstream is paved. The community that paved things over does great, the community downstream suddenly has to deal with all kinds of issues.
The community that paved things over then complains about the "taxpayer dollars that are going to support those stupid people that built where it floods". The folks downstream are forced out, and their property is sold to developers, and the cycle repeats.
This is the historical pattern that explains a lot of why people get _really_ touchy about the whole "why would you live here" part.
At present, the main controversy is around targeted buyouts, which can be a very reasonable way of handling things overall. They're voluntary (we'll give you X for your house, will you take it?), and only offered if a property has flooded multiple times or is deemed at extremely high risk of flooding. They're supposed to be held by govt and kept in an undeveloped state. In practice, it often gets more murky, with the properties quickly being sold, yet again, to developers. Targeted buyouts are a very good way to handle things -- it's the execution that folks often object to. Again, history plays a role.
One thing to end on: Nowhere is particularly immune to disasters. There are certainly lower-risk and higher-risk areas, but trying to mark _vast_ swaths off-limits will end poorly. My point is, saying all of the broader Houston-Beaumont region is uninhabitable is just silly. We have floods due to hurricanes. Other places have fires, or droughts, or earthquakes, etc. It's a game of "pick your poison". We're higher risk than, say, Denver, sure. We're lower risk than say, SF, or Seattle, or Miami though.
Following the same logic, we should evacuate all the states that depend on the Ogallala aquifer, an aquifer that will be pumped dry in a couple of decades from now.
Those states will become a desert: South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico.
It also won't necessarily be "desert" when the aquifer is pumped dry. Best case, it looks more like the great plains and less like corn fields. Cheyenne gets 17 inches of rain per year, Amarillo gets 20 inches, so neither would be a desert.
Without the aquifer you cannot sustain the current crop yield, livestock headcount, many jobs would be impacted, and cost of living will rise. These phenomenons can have a cascading impact on other sectors of the economy... not only in the states sitting on top of the aquifer, but the entire country.
Perhaps it will not be a literal desert, but it will be a desert for the purposes of agriculture.
Given the comments I've repeatedly received due to my accent, I'd disagree.
I'm a bit sick of being called an "ignorant hick" or a "fucking stupid redneck" just because everyone can tell where I grew up if they hear me speak.
Yeah, I can be outspoken, but being told that because I'm disagreeing about something technical in a professional setting really gets under my skin, and it happens a lot. People on the east/west coast really do hold it against you if you're not from the east or west coast.
It's odd to call foul in a thread about climate change disasters when Texas politicians continue to deny that it even exists. Or to reject Federal aid to coastal states but beg for relief yourselves after Harvey. "Hick" is a supremely ignorant word to use but "hypocrite" seems accurate for the good ole' Republic of Texas.
And you assume we're all the same? All the cities in Texas are solidly democratic, fwiw. State politics are controlled by rural counties, similar to the US as a whole.
Not just Texas. When most of my friends were freaking out after the 2016 election I spent a bunch of time drilling down into the detailed election results. My take, there are no red states/blue states.
The divide is totally 'rural' / 'urban'. I put scare quotes because I think the definition is local and fungible. There are towns of 100,000 in New York that voted 'red' and little cities in places like Montana that voted 'blue'
Sure but pretty much all cities are solidly blue unless you look at Oklahoma or Kansas or something like that. The Texas oil industry has a unique place in skewing the discussion on climate change. Even if TX flipped blue, it will be hard to dislodge the prevailing denialism. Insert Upton Sinclair quote here.
That all said, I'm sorry you get roped into the same crowd pushing for Bible study and creationism in public schools. Identity and politics are viewed as inseparable these days.
Agreed. I grew up in the PNW, but in a predominantly black neighborhood. I married somebody who was from a very white new england suburb. They were downright intolerant of folks with a southern accent and literally called them stupid (the most memorable was an expert scientist being interviewed on NPR). It took several years of me bringing up that bigotry for them to come around and try to work on it.
Seconded, and I don't have much of an accent at all (especially if I'm focusing on it). Even without that, east- and west-coast natives hear I'm from Texas and jump to the "stupid redneck" thing.
I just wanted to corroborate this. Im originally from up north and have lived in texas for over 30 years and my brain still interprets a southern accent as ignorant/lack of education. I still have cognitive dissonance when I hear rocket scientists from nasa (houston) with southern accents.
Are we proposing to relocate every resident and business along the US gulf coast? I don't think Texas is more or less susceptible to hurricanes than the rest of the gulf.
And from the looks of the northwest, there's a chance we'd be relocating folks into the path of worsening wildfires.
Climate change is serious and we should respond with corresponding urgency, but let's not pretend that there's anywhere in the US that is 100% guaranteed to be a safe haven.
Maybe less than others but we're not unaffected. Boston is very susceptible to sea level rise and fisheries are going to be turned upside down from a warming ocean.
As someone who lives in the Houston metro area, I totally agree that there are places in the country better situated at the present moment. My broader point aligns with the other comment here - on the timeframe in which we'd think about these problems, virtually every area of the country will find itself wrestling with changing conditions, many of them with a net negative result. There was an interesting map I came across that tracked where climate change forecasts would move the "ideal zone" of habitation in North America - IIRC, quite a bit of the zone shifts into southern Canada and the northern midwest.
It's pretty simple to prevent neighborhoods from having to be "rebuilt" after a hurricane: require all construction to be concrete. Such laws are common in Florida and the Caribbean and probably need to be put in place along the Gulf Coast too.
That would be counter-productive. The risk from hurricanes in this area (i.e. relatively inland western gulf coast) isn't wind. It's water.
Build on stilts, not concrete. There's a reason we build the way we do here. We're not stupid.
Concrete just _guarantees_ that the building is uninhabitable in 2-3 years due to the shrink-swell clays in the soils here. Wood flexes. Brick and concrete don't.
The fact that an air intake borders our brain is a massive security weakness in our "intelligent" design (the quotes are for sarcasm). It's like allowing HTTP calls from your webservers to be routed, in some circumstances, to your not-firewalled, not-SSL, not-password-protected database. Like building a massive bank vault with all sorts of protective layers, then adding a small unlocked door that opens on the street.
I just hate that the smallest sinus infection can affect my overall system by producing massive headaches, or that these mofo organisms can just trek up my nose and feast on my brain cells. Clearly the Earth atmosphere is just too welcoming; selection on this trait was never forced, and here we are.
The minute we start making cyborg augmentations to improve filtering of our air ducts, I'll be the first in line.
The sense of smell is ancient and has served animals well since forever. That's why the close coupling. The olfactory bulb is like a part of the brain in the nasal cavity.
Your eyes are actually an outgrowth of your brain and they're exposed right out in front. The eyes have their own extra defenses though.
Still, we have highly-effective sensors in other parts of our bodies, further away from the brain, and surely we could drop that check somewhere else. At least when it comes to eyes, one can make the argument that they should enable split-second reactions to run from that predator as soon as you spot it, so they should be as close as possible to the mainframe... whereas nobody is going to die if they can only smell wolf poo a second later.
>whereas nobody is going to die if they can only smell wolf poo a second later.
I'm still alive today because I can detect smoke very early. This ability has saved me from indoor electrical fires and wildfires. Hunter gatherers who lived in makeshift shelters probably depended even more frequently on this ability.
Signals can travel relatively fast across the entire length of a human central nervous system. Proximity to the brain likely benefits signal-to-noise ratio more than speed.
Your threat model here is wild. You'd rather have machines surgically installed in part of your actual brain than risk an amebiasis that you're only seeing in the news right now because it so rarely actually happens to anyone that House, MD did a whole, typically awful, two-parter about it.
If you're really worried about defending your brain from all comers, you should really start by having all your maxillary teeth pulled and replacing them with a denture plate. Their roots are a lot closer to your brain than you likely realize, and an untreated maxillary abscess is much more likely to quickly progress to fatal encephalopathy than you are to ever insufflate water containing N. fowleri.
> You'd rather have machines surgically installed in part of your actual brain
Not the brain, just nose and mouth. Saying bye to colds, headaches, allergies, respiratory infections, with a simple filter? Fuck yes :)
> you should really start by having all your maxillary teeth pulled
Oh yeah, if I weren't so poor I would have done that years ago. I still hope to be wealthy enough, one day, that I'll be able to replace all my teeth with artificial ones that don't decay.
No; a mask i don’t have to put on and off, doesn’t stop me from talking clearly, doesn’t stop from eating and drinking, doesn’t make my face sweat, doesn’t make my glasses steamed, doesn’t need to be replaced every day, etc etc.
Yup. As experienced by anyone who was drinking something while they read or heard something funny. Suddenly, you have your drink coming out of your nose.
They don't exactly contradict if you read them carefully. They were probably answer to different question.
CDC is right. The route from bacteria to brain goes trough olfactory nerves and tract that connect directly to the brain. Just swallowing water is not dangerous.
At worst, the Lake Jackson authorities are being excessively cautious. When drinking, there's a slight chance of some liquid not being swallowed, after all.
Given the recent fatality, erring on the side of caution seems quite understandable.
If I were living in the region served by Brazosport Water Authority, I'd be more interested in the criteria used to proclaim the safety of the rest of the service area, especially after perusing this:
Apparently, it's the Brazosport Water Authority, and the warning applies to 6 cities and 2 prisons: "Angleton, Brazoria, Richwood, Oyster Creek, Clute and Rosenberg, Texas, as well as for the Dow Chemical plant in Freeport and the Clemens and Wayne Scott Texas Department of Criminal Justice corrections facilities."
The prisons is a bad situation, as I imagine the prisonsers don't have much they can do about the tap in their cell. Some allow immersion heaters, some don't, and the prisoners typically have to buy them with funds their families provide.
That's just as reductive as saying the whole thing is degenerating. Plenty of places in the U.S. are moving backwards. A lot of population centers are not though, so it's not fair to say that all of the U.S. is degenerative, but it's also not as fair to say it's only the media's framing.
It’s true the media only focuses on long-tail events to generate revenue. Studies have shown people who consume more media like this are actually less informed about reality, because their mindset starts veering from groking ‘the norm’ of the situation.
It’s solely the media’s framing if the claim is that the US as a whole is degenerating, which was his claim. I never made any claim as to the nuanced state of the US, so you’re responding to a claim I never made which is a strawman.
I never saw Hacker News as a "international computer news web site".
Usually, in my favourite threads, someone posts a problem (be it a deadly amoeba in the water supply, be it an unsolved math theorem) and in the comments solutions are discussed (often involving technology, sometimes not).
If a discussion starts here about tech advancements to water supply planning, that would be interesting to me.
Can I ask why a kid dying from a deadly amoeba in the water is political and a man dying after eating a bag of liquorice isn't?
Because there's the expectation that regulated water systems are actually effective enough that we can use their output safely, while the licorice case is largely a case of self-induced tragedy.
Admittedly, there is a case to be made the licorice does have a political component in that we know it can be deadly, but do not mark it on the package. In my calculus though, water safety and fitness for use of municipal water output scores a lot higher on the public concern/public health meter than labelling one particular confectionary treat.
Both can reasonably be accommodated mind, but I'd be far more open to putting force of public mandate behind the one rather than the other.
> Yet somehow this story make it to the front page of an international computer news web site.
what's news-worthy isn't the same as what's high impact.
Car crashes kill so many people every day, yet you barely hear about it. The most you'd hear about is a high speed chase or a high way pile up. Because it's rare and interesting.
So definitely examine what you read, but also learn about recency bias and such to prevent being "tricked" into thinking the wrong thing about the true state of the world.
One of the only things that stuck with me from my statistics course at university was when the professor explained newsworthiness is (or at least should be) essentially a statistical function - the less expected an outcome is the more newsworthy it is. I think it’s fair to say citizens dying of a brain eating microbe is fairly unexpected and therefore newsworthy.
Which is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) similar to many approaches in ML training. We train our ability to predict the future (i.e. consequences of actions) by consuming information about things we would have mispredicted (so called novel events, or news).
The danger is that if we only consume newsworthy events, we lose sense of the baseline and start only predicting outliers everywhere. We need to consume statistics or everyday stories from a diverse group of people in addition to news.
It is, precisely for the reason GP gave. The eye-catching headlines are usually ones that tell you something that's unexpected. Sometimes because the event is unexpected, other times because the headline is massaged until the point it sounds as if the event is something unexpected.
But what are we defining newsworthy as? Your professor’s formula sounds like the formula for 24/7 news and clickbait. Shouldn’t something that is actually newsworthy be something that is highly impactful for a large amount of people?
No. Unless you're exceptionally intelligent, don't do that. I can tell you, the average person had a more reasonable picture of the world back in the 90s than today, despite the multitudes now "doing the research". Being skeptical is not the correct approach for the average person; they just wind up watching Alex Jones, investing their life savings in Dogecoin and drinking silver nitrate. Trust experts!
Want a more accurate and reasonable picture of the world? The first step: just stop reading news. Watching Alex Jones is obviously bad for you, but binging on CNN isn't good for your well-being either. And if anything important happens, you'll hear about it.
(And yes, I'm aware this fails Kant's categorical imperative.)
Just want to say I regret the tone I used in my reply, which was not in the spirit of HN. You're correct that some level of skepticism is good. My actual view, if I leave out the hyperbole, is that in the current era, we've reached paranoid levels of it.
That's a fair point you're making here! Also "skepticism" that's used to justify believing whatever you want to believe, regardless of what the evidence says. That's a problem.
My reply is something a bit different: I believe news in general is junk food for your brain. The incentives involved in news publishing today tend to go against accuracy and truthfulness, and the things most described are usually the things that matter least - so news ultimately yields a negative value in terms of understanding the world around you. Better to pick a book instead.
I think few would argue that big news outlets are free of bias and sensationalism. The questions is to what degree?
There's a tendency, on the internet, to write off establishment people and groups completely, based on their all-time most egregious mistake (eg: The NYT is reduced to their toadying to Bush over WMD, election polling is meaningless because it failed to predict 2016, etc).
Most of these organizations aren't stellar, but, at this point, the public perception is so paranoid it makes Noam Chomsky sound as credulous as a boy scout.
Even the well off in a society seem to profit from everyone else being happier. For example your healthcare is better and cheaper if it doesn't need to care for insolvent blue smurfs
> Coronavirus stories about individuals and long term complications.
Wat?
By definition, nobody yet has long term consequences from a virus that is less than a year old. Some people might have medium term consequences, but nobody has lived with it for decades yet.
Careful not to mix up definitions. "Long-term" in medicine does not mean "extended period of time." It more often means "requiring continuous monitoring or care over an extended period of time." COVID-19 patients are still actively monitored, especially now as we have meta-studies just released this month showing SARS-CoV-2 appears to have some preference to selectively target ACE2 (vasodilation). We don't have concrete alphas on any target yet, but we certainly have longitudinal studies in progress. It's been one year from the first cases appearing in Wuhan. We have traced and confirmed more than a dozen variants originating in post-Wuhan areas. The recent surge in new cases is owed almost exclusively to two variants with significantly higher transmissibility.
Last, I'd like to point out that while I agree this type of virus is relatively new to humans, and the -2 virus is very new, we do have a wealth of longitudinal knowledge from SARS and MERS cases to work with in conjunction with what we are discovering about SARS-CoV-2. So far, it is not the patients with respiratory illness that we need to be concerned about. It is the patients with zero respiratory symptoms, but high risk of other cardiovascular and autoimmune symptoms. I think we're more baffled by how this one virus can go from putting someone on a ventilator to putting someone at a significant risk of stroke in such a short period of time.
That said, I agree with you that these are apples and oranges. The brain-eating amoebas are a panic thing. COVID-19 is not something to shake a fist at. COVID-19 has been found in spinal fluid. Given SARS and MERS do not share this trait, we have a lot more reason to take -2 as a serious threat, regardless of its extremely high short-term survival rate.
Well regardless, i still don't know what type of point OP was trying to make.
The interest in this story is obviously not because anyone thinks there is an actual world wide risk of a massive outbreak of brain eating amoebas. Things can be both interesting and not the start of a zombie apocolypse at the same time.
> Things can be both interesting and not the start of a zombie apocolypse at the same time.
But then you shouldn’t sell it as one. The headline is pretty clickbaity given the reality of things, and sadly this is a common trend. I think that’s OPs point.
Seems pretty factual to me. One (small) US city warned about water supply contaminated with this microbe.
The water really was contaminated. The residents really were warned not to use the water supply. The contaminate really does kill people by eating their brains.
The headline did not say to go full panic mode for people not in the affected area. The headline did not say the situation was out of control. Which part of the headline was misleading or panic mongering?
It can be factually accurate and clickbaity at the same time. Extremely few people have to be worried about this in practice, but the headline reads like it’s from a cheap zombie movie.
> Which part of the headline was misleading or panic mongering?
They don’t state which city it’s about (so it could be any major one), and mention the water supply which implies everyone is affected. They want you to go “oh shit, this could be my town”. They do tell you that it’s only in a small dump somewhere in Texas, and that it’s only killed 34 people in 10 years, but only after you clicked. The headline is definitely alarmist given the benign contents of the article.
Deaths are rare because the populace in the affected area is notified when the virus reaches serious levels of contamination, and they can take preventive measures. As is done in this case. So yes, exactly like in this case and Coronavirus, notifying people of the dangers gives them the opportunity to take protective measures before widespread tragedy takes place.
The amoeba isn't very good at getting to people's brains, but once it's there the fatality rate is 95%. So it's rare, but it's still dangerous to have a lot of people exposed.
It's a bit of a horror story but actually has very little real world impact. It's got entertainment value but you might make the case that it's basically just clickbait.
- Downside: though the chances of being affected by brain-eating bacteria are small, the consequences are large, so it makes sense to worry about it not just in proportion to its frequency
- Novelty/newsworthiness: we're pretty aware of the risks of, say, driving or smoking, and we mentally take those into account; we're not as aware of the risks of brain-eating bacteria or a novel coronavirus
- Imperfect measurement: Because being affected by brain-eating bacteria is so rare, the number of cases is almost certainly undercounted; similarly, because the novel coronavirus is novel, people are unlikely to be good at recognizing it 100% of the time
- Non-death negative outcomes: I imagine having a small part of your brain eaten by bacteria is pretty bad even if you don't die
We regularly see outage postmortems make it to the top of this same website, despite those outages only affecting one company and their specific choice of software, and only happening once.
>In this story there have been 34 deaths due to the microbe in the last 10 years. The affected area is a town of 26,000
Maybe you know what you mean but I took these sentences together as there having been 34 cases in the town. Actually there have been only 34 reported cases in the whole US between 2009 and 2018.
Critical thinking along with rational data-based analysis is not that easy to do it seems. I feel like the Corona situation has made this worse, so its good to see some sensibility being applied.
Another passage from the article states: "...could trickle back to New York, which has managed to rein in the outbreak.". At that point New York had around 800-1000 infections daily, a similar number is making other countries increase Corona restrictions even more, e.g. Denmark.
But if you examine the deaths to Corona in New York since June 1st it is a very small number compared to the deaths back in April. So on that fact it seems that lifting indoor restrictions in September 2020 is not very rational, but rather an over-reaction in dealing with the after-effects of the Corona virus.
I hope that data-based decisions will return at some point.
Crazy. I remember last year when the guy died from this thing. I live in the same area as The Fantasy Lake park where he got it, so it was pretty memorable. I wonder if this means that we are starting to see this virus more often. If we are why? Is this a result of global warming? Or is this just the availability heuristic? I hope it's just a mental bias on my part, because the alternative is terrifying.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/8/130814-amoeba...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/brain-eating-amoeba-...