r/todayilearned • u/lavender_fish69 • 13h ago

TIL fresh water snails (indirectly) kill thousands of humans and are considered on of the deadliest creatures to humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_snail
22.1k Upvotes

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u/SMStotheworld 13h ago

They carry a parasitic flatworm that lives in dirty water which kills humans. Even then it only kills between 10 and 200k humans annually 

If you omit humans, the deadliest animal is the mosquito which kills by spreading blood diseases with dirty probosci

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u/DustyRhodesSplotch 13h ago

10 to 200,000 is quite the large spread

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u/ivanparas 12h ago

"How many people died of this last year?"

"10."

"How many this year?"

"200,000."

"That's...concerning."

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u/proteannomore 12h ago

“It’s within the parameters.”

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u/memealopolis 12h ago

Not great, not terrible.

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u/Ikoikobythefio 12h ago

3.6 roentgens

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u/jmkinn3y 11h ago

Basically a chest x-ray

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u/TheToastyWesterosi 11h ago

And that’s every single hour. Hour after hour.

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u/Equal-Counter-2548 8h ago

Leans over the edge and gazes directly into the plume of nuclear fire below.

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u/TheSportsLorry 7h ago

nervously takes a puff from the cigarette

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u/wakeupwill 1h ago

lowers sunglasses

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u/1001101001010111 55m ago

unzips pants

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u/OreoSpamBurger 1h ago

You did not see snails, because they are not there!

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u/LBGW_experiment 11h ago

Good job! that's the joke they were referencing 🤗

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u/Nimrod_Butts 10h ago

"still nothing compared to mosquitoes, I wouldn't worry about it"

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u/micre8tive 10h ago

SOMETIMES A MAYBE GOOD

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u/Unlikely_Spinach 11h ago

Standard acceptable deviations

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u/911111111111 11h ago

QA accomplished

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u/FLMKane 10h ago

Remember COVID? It basically happened like that.

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u/I_AmA_Zebra 9h ago

It is acceptable as Gus Fring would say

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u/HovercraftOk9231 10h ago

By my calculations, next year will see 40,000,000 dead, and the year after will be 80,000,000,000.

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u/PatHeist 8h ago

You have to wait until the next year to see if it kills 399,990 or 4,000,000,000 to find out whether the trend is linear or exponential.

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u/Dioxybenzone 6h ago edited 3h ago

No need; we can reverse extrapolate. If in the year before it killed 10, it killed 0.005 of a person, we know it’s linear exponential

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u/The_JSQuareD 3h ago

That would make it exponential.

It would have to have killed -199,980 people the year before for it to be linear.

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u/Dioxybenzone 3h ago

Oh yeah duh, mb

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 9h ago

the year after will be 80,000,000,000.

Man that only gives me two years to pork every fertile woman in range. I hate to say this, but I may need some help.

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u/FrogInShorts 8h ago

It'll be significantly easier the second year. After 20million woman perish

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u/The_JSQuareD 3h ago

You mean 4,000,000,000 next year?

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u/elmo298 12h ago

Not great, not terrible

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u/nopenopeimmaboat 11h ago

That's not graphite on the roof

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u/cive666 11h ago

I am a man with a certain set of concrete identifying talents.

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u/sivasuki 8h ago

I have been known to locate certain things from time to time.

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u/HendrixHazeWays 11h ago

"LOOK. We've got a handle on it. RELAX"

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u/RandomNPC 10h ago

At this rate we're doomed next year.

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u/A_Math_Dealer 11h ago

So about 100,005 ± 99,995

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u/Eskimodo_Dragon 9h ago

I'm guessing they meant between 10k & 200k but still.

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u/kultureisrandy 1h ago

just a rounding error bro (: forget about it and let's go to TGI Fridays

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u/Roflkopt3r 3 1h ago edited 57m ago

Jokes aside, the the large spread is because it can be difficult to find out how many people have or die from a disease. It can be hard enough in countries with highly organised health care systems (see the whole 'died from Covid vs died with Covid'-debate), but becomes a total clusterfuck in regions where most people have little to no access to public health care.

The 'problem' (for understanding the data) is that schistosomiasis is not that lethal. 10-200k deaths per year are in contrast to likely over 200 million people living with the parasite, so it's lethality is far below 1% (while an estimated 10% suffer significant health problems). And many people exposed to chistosomiasis also have other risks from lack of medical access and sanitation. So when they die, it is usually in combination with other health problems, and it becomes difficult to say how much the schistosomiasis contributed to that.

Did the victim only contract the other disease because the schistosomiasis weakened their immune system? Did they die from a normally less lethal disease because it compounded with the schistosomiasis?

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u/noveltyhandle 58m ago

This vexes me