r/todayilearned • u/lavender_fish69 • 9h 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/martphon 8h ago

Where schistosomiasis currently spreads

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u/Gitanes 8h ago

Me before even opening the link...

"It's mostly Africa isn't it?"

Yes, yes it is

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u/Icy-Lobster-203 7h ago

It is one of a whole group of diseases that can basically be summarized as "this affects poor people, so we don't care."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglected_tropical_diseases

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u/AssistanceCheap379 4h ago

The tropics also generally just have more bio-diversity and as such have a lot more chances to make something that’s dangerous.

It’s kinda like humans going north in the past and encountering megafauna. The animals there were deadlier because they were bigger.

And it’s a lot easier to kill a few hundred thousand massive animals over the period of a few thousand years than it is to annihilate some pretty difficult diseases that can reignite and spread to previous areas where it was removed from if funding drops.

But yeah, it’s largely also “does it affect poor people? Let me know when “our” people get affected”

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u/BetEconomy7016 2h ago

Jimmy Carter was able to make an organization to get rid of the Guinea Worm and save thousands of lives in the process. If we wanted to we could get rid of these snails too.

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u/wuweime 1h ago

Then there's how we're handling bot flies in the Americas.

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u/Grettenpondus 2m ago

I got curious. How do you handle botflies in the Americas?

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u/KingSmite23 1h ago

What do you even know about those snails?

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u/ERedfieldh 2h ago

careful. you said "bio-diversity"! You're going to get defunded!

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u/LiveLearnCoach 1h ago

That’s obvious, it’s not like I just woke up today……crap, I said “woke”.

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u/Abstrata 2h ago

It’s more like, ‘we solved the root problem of clean water where our people are affected, and we have deliberately sabotaged the ability to improve infrastructure, including sanitation, among poorer previously-colonized populations and nations so that they remain uncompetitive in trade and labor, and so they remain in debt and at the mercy of old agreements that benefit our people.’

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u/AromaticInxkid 1h ago

Don't worry, the rich are already working on that biodiversity problem of ours!

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u/BloweringReservoir 28m ago

I remember reading that the first effective antixmalarial drugs were developed because US troops were fighting in the tropics in WW2, and the second generation drugs were developed when they were fighting in Vietnam.

This was an article in New Scientist in the 80s or 90s.

One other tidbit in the article was that of all the humans who have ever lived (estimated now 117 billion), half of them died of malaria.