If there’s one thing I don’t put a whole lot of stock in, it’s scientific and medical information provided by random websites. Like this one, Corante, which claims that toxoplasma, a virus that incubates in cats, affects rats’ brains so that they are less afraid of cats. Then it goes on to suggest that half of all people are infected with this virus, and that it has unknown, subtle but possibly harmful effects on people. It just makes me think about how little we really know about most of the vast community of microorganisms inhabiting our bodies. The scariest thing would be something that is harmful, but has a long incubation period so it can infect a large fraction of the population before we are even aware of it.
Tag Archives: pandemic
Ebola
The Ebola situation makes for some scary headlines. From the CDC, the number of cases as I write this (July 31) in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone is 1,322 of which 728 (55%) have died.
Ebola is a disease with no known cure which incubates in bats. To put these numbers in perspective, Wikipedia says that 8,231 people in Haiti have died of cholera since 2010, a disease we know the exact cause of and exactly how to prevent (clean drinking water) and treat (staying hydrated with clean drinking water).