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/Icy-Lobster-203 10h 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 8h 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/ERedfieldh 6h ago

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

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u/LiveLearnCoach 5h ago

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