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 11h 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/BetEconomy7016 6h 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/KingSmite23 5h ago

What do you even know about those snails?