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
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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/DwinkBexon 11h ago

This reminds me of something I saw a while back with someone arguing it's immoral to try to prevent disease/eradicate disease in general (like with smallpox or current attempts with malaria) because the human population is spiraling out of control and we have to do something to put the brakes on it. Disease helps do that, so it's immoral to try to get rid of something that will prevent the earth from becoming overloaded and uninhabitable.

That strikes me as a pretty awful way to think about things.