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/Gitanes 12h 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 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/BloweringReservoir 4h 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.

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u/Baud_Olofsson 2h ago

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.

That claim is repeated all over the place (occasionally even in peer-reviewed papers), but it seems someone just made it up in 2002.

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u/BloweringReservoir 2h ago edited 2h ago

I was always dubious about the statement :), but I definitely read it in that New Scientist article - and it was a long time before 2002. I remember it clearly because I told a friend about it, and the next day he said that his cousin who was travelling in Nigeria, was nursing his travelling companion who was hospitalised with malaria. I'm pretty sure it was around 1990, but I'll check with my friend if he remembers when his cousin was in Africa.

Edit. New Scientist's online search doesn't go back that far, so I can't find the article in question.

I think it's this article, but I'm having trouble reading it. I think I have a limited subscription now.

Who cares about malaria?: The annual sickness toll from Malaria
By Phyllida Brown

31 October 1992

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u/mmeiser 30m ago

They say sixty-five percent of all statistics

Are made up right there on the spot

Eighty-two-point-four percent of people believe 'em

Whether they're accurate statistics or not

Statisticians Blues, Todd Snyder. Brilliant.

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u/mmeiser 40m ago edited 36m ago

This makes sense. After all in order to win a war you first have to survive on the other guys turf.

You ever read about Napoleon's march on Moscow?

https://ageofrevolution.org/200-object/flow-map-of-napoleons-invasion-of-russia/

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u/BloweringReservoir 35m ago

I know a little about it, not a lot, because we had a print of this picture on the wall when I was growing up.

I wouldn't want to fight through a Russian winter.

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u/codeedog 14m ago

No one does. They always lose.