Imagine feeling like that and trying to go to school, work, or take care of your family. It would be impossible. It's undoubtedly contributed to the lack of development in most of Africa.
THANK YOU for posting a substantive comment on this article that links to other information on the same topic. Too many of the other comments in this thread are dragging down the level of discourse here on Hacker News. I'll link to some World Health Organization information about malaria[1] here to do my part to make the conversation informative and thoughtful. The malaria parasite microorganism, one of the species of the Plasmodium genus of protozoa,[2] is also being targeted directly both for vaccine prevention and for drug treatment of malaria, but part of the Plasmodium life cycle is obligatorily in living mosquitoes, so to kill mosquitoes is to reduce the load of the parasite and its risk to human populations. This fact (and the fact that mosquitoes transmit other dangerous diseases, including the fatal West Nile virus[3] where I live) is why understanding mosquito control better will be helpful to the world. Indeed, scientists who have considered the issue have been reported to say that a world without mosquitoes at all would be a fine world.[4]
I suspect this as a lot to do with why tropical countries are less prosperous despite all the benefits of living in the tropics. Still, I find it somewhat disingenuous to downplay the ~1,200,000 vehicle related deaths as somehow not caused by people.
My mother has a degree in Archaeology and considers Jared Diamond fairly suspect (Guns, Germs and Steel in particular). Apparently he cites some articles/books that have various problems (methodology, factual errors, etc.) These problems were well known at the time that he was writing.
I would encourage anyone who reads it to also read reviews/critiques by qualified people.
Read the book during a comparative politics class, so yes I have read a fair number of critical articles. That being said I have also read a fair number of scholarly articles in support of the angle that Jared Diamond was getting at. No one is right always, that is why you must be objective and read critical peer reviewed articles.
So, in indonesia (bill gates recently came here) mosquitos really thrive in all regions. One of the most common and dangerous disease caused by them are (known locally as) "Demam Berdarah" with the literal translation is "Bloody Fever", i don't know if it is the same with the "dengue fever" stated in the article (i have a bad English). This disease is very dangerous especially in rainy season, when there are very many water puddle everywhere and the mosquitos breed. Sometimes hospitals have a very tough time here when the patients start flowing in a very large volumes. So i am grateful to bill gates for giving a grant for solving this problem
> One of the most common and dangerous disease caused by them are (known locally as) "Demam Berdarah" with the literal translation is "Bloody Fever", i don't know if it is the same with the "dengue fever" stated in the article (i have a bad English)
Using wikipedia, the Indonesian "Demam Berdarah" article is linked to the English "Denge Fever" article, so probably.
Ah yes, it appearantly so it is the same "Dengue Fever". The most common ones here in Indonesia is the ones which caused by mosquitos named "Aedes Aegypti".
We were tought in primary schools here to always be vigilant for this kind of particular mosquitos. They are characterized by a certain colour, "Black and White" stripes on their body.
also, in Brazil we call Dengue and the main prevention tactic is indeed to eliminate the "water puddle everywhere" so the mosquitoes can't breed. So, very probably the same.
Yeah, every rainy season there are some kind of campaigns here to bury or burn garbages, regularly clean or change water containers, etc. To minimize the breeding grounds for the mosquitos.
Last month I spent 2 weeks in Rwanda with my wife & daughters, visiting two friends who have been there for about a year. One of them has also spent a lot of time in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa.
Rwanda is land-locked and largely high-altitude, so malaria is not nearly so prevalent there, but it's still around.
It's already preventable -- we came with a sufficient supply of antimalarial pills, but they're so expensive it's obviously not a solution. We got yellow fever vaccinations before coming -- that was a no-brainer -- and we actively avoided mosquito bites, esp. for the little ones. My friend who has traveled widely in Africa doesn't take anti-malarials -- too pricey -- has gotten malaria, once, and it put him in the hospital for a couple of days.
He says many of the people he knows have had it, multiple times -- it's just a fact of life, and it sucks, but (probably) you'll live, and then have some protection against getting it again.
Gates talks about it as being debilitating -- apparently it's not always so bad, if you've had it before (and people talk about having "a touch of the malaria"!), but generally he's on the mark about the costs.
The most common victims of diseases like malaria in countries without access to basic medical resources is children and the elderly. Most of the people who die from malaria are under 5 years old. Out of the 207 million people who got malaria in 2012, only 0.3% of those people died.
In contrast, diarrhea kills more children under five each year (760,000) than all of the people killed by malaria each year. But it's much harder to combat diarrhea because of both the varied nature of its cause/transmission and a lack of clean drinking water. (It is comparatively much easier to treat/prevent malaria than it is diarrhea)
> Gates talks about it as being debilitating -- apparently it's not always so bad
At the social level it is debilitating, without good treatments there's a high risk of acute respiratory distress and renal failure, and more importantly in children cerebral malaria causes direct brain damage and regular malaria causes anemia, leading to increased risks of cognitive deficits and behavioural disorders.
Good point -- the expense is serious, but also widely using low levels of drugs that are effective treatments as antimalarials means giving the parasite lots more great opportunities to evolve resistance (which is already happening, and is a serious upcoming problem).
> At the social level it is debilitating...
Yup, I agreed with Gates' conclusions; I was trying to share some direct experience.
It really depends on your appetite for risk. One of my colleagues has been taking Lariam for about 25 years, and I usually carry two weeks-worth of extra Malarone doses when I travel (might switch to Lariam for my next trip).
If you've not taken it before, be extremely careful with Lariam, it has been well-established to cause numerous kinds of really unpleasant psychological side-effects in some people. Even got an FDA Black Box warning for it[1] recently.
I have personal experience of taking it for ~4 months as directed and suffering from extremely vivid hallucinations and extreme insomnia. I also managed to contract Malaria whilst taking it, twice.
Anecdote, pinch of salt, etc. But do some research yourself, ask your doctor, and definitely think twice.
(The other nice thing about Malarone is that it's also good for treating an actual infection, as well as for prophylaxis, assuming wherever you're travelling isn't resistant to it. And it's just gone generic, in the UK at least, and also worldwide, I think?))
It's mostly that the snakes avoid you. Snakes don't see humans as food and so mostly get out of the way when humans approach.
In Australia, where I live, it's said that even in the suburbs there will be a snake living somewhere close by. But most people will rarely ever see a snake and most snake bites are from people being foolish, like trying to kill a cornered snake.
Only four to six Australians suffer a fatal snake bite each year, and this is with our famous collection of highly venomous snakes [1]. I understand that fatal snake bites are much more common in India though, and I guess that's from population pressure and many more Indians living a rural life.
The way I had it explained to me by a first aide instructor, although gram for gram of venom, Australian snakes are some of the worst, the delivery system is not as efficient.
Venomous Australian snakes generally have a groove down the outside of the tooth which the venom runs down. So when bitten a lot of venom will get soaked into the clothing, and it generally goes into the lymph node system more than into the bloodstream.
Whereas Indian snakes have a hollow tooth like a hypodermic needle which delivers the venom efficiently into the bloodstream.
We have adders in the UK which are poisonous, though rarely deadly (the greatest risk being to children and the elderly). They're very shy and personally I've never seen one (they are present where I live) but their first instinct is to run away if they have a chance.
Nice incident of a tourist near where I live picking one up to have a photo taken with it and being bitten in the face and rushed to hospital. He survived which saved the doctor having to put "stupidity" down under cause of death.
Here in Panama snakes bite about 2500 people per year (out of 3 million), mostly in the dry season. Here it is common practice to burn the rain forest around settlements to combat snakes. Only about 25 people die, but more have amputations because the most common snakes here are pit vipers with tissue destroying venom. Snakes here are typically not aggressive, the largest danger is stepping too close to one. I've had several near misses with snakes while out running trails in the rain forest (about one snake per month, though usually not venemous.) I've also had a big pit viper attack my car when I drove about a meter from it. You should have seen the face of the guy who washed it when I told him that the streaks were fer-de-lance venom!
Even in the countryside, it's rare to see snakes unless you're actively looking for them. And the few somewhat dangerous ones (mostly the common adder) is fairly small and shy, not aggressive, and very rarely dangerous.
There's an area not far from where I live (midwestern U.S.) where I've seen numerous snakes. You can just be walking out in a grassy area, and snakes dart left and right trying to not get stepped on. Totally harmless, unless maybe you tried to annoy them.
But I'm guessing you'd be most interested in avoiding more harmful snakes, like, how to avoid being killed by a python or some-such. I too have only seen pythons in zoos.
In Greece we have plenty, in the countryside and in the Islands. If you go to Ithaca for example, you'll come across many snakes in June-August if you visit the villages on the hills.
You avoid them by learning to live with them. Most snakes are afraid of human. Some are not poisonous. People who live in the specific knows what's dangerous and what's not, where they live what to do and how to react.
Really the biggest risk is if you're walking in the veld and step on one accidentally, they are not aggressive animals that seek confrontation with humans. Unfortunately they hide themselves very well and are entirely motionless when resting so it's easy to accidentally step on.
A snakebite is not usually deadly. Most deaths occur in poor parts of Africa where people do not get appropriate treatment.
Not to be That Guy, but millions and millions of these deaths were preventable. The UN vote to effectively ban DDT has got to be one of the worst public health disasters in history. It is sickening.
Why trade a public health disaster for an environment disaster that will likely lead to a different public health disaster? Current restrictions seem reasonable.
"The Stockholm Convention, which took effect in 2004, outlawed several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted DDT use to vector control. The Convention has been ratified by more than 170 countries and is endorsed by most environmental groups. Recognizing that total elimination in many malaria-prone countries is currently unfeasible because there are few affordable or effective alternatives, public health use is exempt from the ban pending acceptable alternatives."
> Why trade a public health disaster for an environment disaster that will likely lead to a different public health disaster?
This is a false dichotomy. And regarding your other point:
“Every life saved this year in a poor country diminishes the quality of life for subsequent generations.”
-Paul Ehrlich, 1968
“By using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations.”
-Michael McCloskey, 1971
“So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”
-Alexander King, 1990
"An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products."
"WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention."
"Thanks largely to the use of DDT in Namibia, malaria related hospital admissions and deaths fell by 92% (29,059 to 2,264) and 96% (1,370 to 46) between 2001 and 2009. Similar trends have been seen in Botswana, South Africa, and Swaziland. For these benefits to be outweighed by risks requires reproducible evidence that DDT is dangerous, but none exists. WHO’s latest assessment found no evidence for concern “about levels of exposure for any of the end-points that were assessed” in carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, or developmental toxicity.
Yet despite this endorsement and admirable malaria control results, UNEP is trying to eliminate DDT again. As major UNEP donors, including the European Union, have endorsed WHO’s position, UNEP’s motivations are unclear."
So, you are arguing that DDT is being banned simply as a means of population control?
"WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention."
By your quote there, it sounds like the World Health Organization stopped promoting the use of DDT 30 in homes years ago due to health and environmental concerns. Is that part of the conspiracy too?
It seems to be more of a regrettable alliance between chemical companies, conservationists who refuse to compromise when it comes to the environment, their elected representatives, and yes, a few Club-of-Rome type genocidal misanthropes who actually think that the planet is not big enough for everyone and so other people should have to die.
A conspiracy only in the sense that Julian Assange uses the word.
This is hyperbole. The DDT "ban" was on agricultural use. Many countries have continuously used DDT for malaria prevention, and some countries have successfully controlled malaria without any DDT at all.
DDT spread way too broadly in the ecosystem, to species it had never been tested on, and it persisted a long time. It was known to interfere with critical species such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria. This is not something you want to mess around blindly with, which is what we did by putting DDT into widespread use without adequate testing.
There are three effective ways to control insects.
1. Poison them with something that is dangerous to a wide variety of life.
2. Poison them with something that is narrowly targeted to the species you are trying to control and is harmless to other species.
3. Deal with them mechanically, such as by crushing them or tearing them apart.
DDT and similar pesticides take the #1 approach. To do that safely you have to carefully control the spread of your pesticide so that it doesn't spread to species you do not want to harm. You can do this by being very careful in how it is applied, and designing it to break down quickly and not spread beyond the application area. We failed in this aspect with DDT.
The #2 approach is quite feasible. The way it works is that you base your pesticide on hormones of your target species. Insects are essentially biological robots running conceptually simple and very inflexible state machines. Various hormones control this, triggering various programs that run on the state machine. For instance, there might be a particular hormone that activates in the males when the weather changes, triggering in males a flight to find a female, and after that program runs the male dies. A different hormone might trigger female mating behavior.
Entomologists can study that species, and identify the various behavior programs built into the insect state machine, and figure out what hormones active which programs. Then a pesticide can be designed that mimics the hormone that starts the male mating subroutine. Spray that on them when it is not the right time of the year, so the females are not having their mating program trigger, and the males will go do their (now futile) mating flight and die.
The best part about this is that it is safe for other species, because these program control hormones for one species are almost always harmless to other species up the food chain. (To be up the food chain from something, you kind of need to have evolved to not be bothered by its hormones).
Another nice thing about the #2 approach is that the pests do not develop immunity. If an insect develops immunity to, say, the hormone that triggers its mating flight, then it is not going to mate when that trigger fires naturally, and so whatever mutation provided that immunity dies off.
The #3 approach is also quite feasible...and no, I don't mean importing cheap migrant workers to go out with tweezers in the fields and crush insects. :-) I'm talking about finding an insect the preys upon or is a parasite to the insect you want to control, and using it. Entomologists can study a pest species and identify what its enemies and parasites are (and there usually are some), and then you can introduce those to control the pest species. Unlike higher forms of like, like reptiles and birds and mammals, insects tend to be very picky about what they prey upon or what they are parasites to. If you've got a particular species of invasive insect from Florida destroying your California citrus crop, and you import the species of parasitic wasp that kills the pest, when it kills them it does not turn to some other species for hosting services. It dies.
The big problem with #2 and #3 is that there are a lot of insect species, and a lot of predator and parasite species, and not a lot of entomologists. This is discussed in the excellent book "Life on a Little Known Planet" by Howard Ensign Evans [1]. He was one of the worlds leading experts on parasitic wasps. There are hundreds or thousands of species of them, most very small (the size of pinhead or smaller). In the book, he tells the story of that pest destroying the California crop. Officials did try to import the parasitic wasp from Florida that kept the pest in control there.
It failed. Eventually, after the crop was destroyed, they found out why. It turns out that what was thought to be one species of parasitic wasp was actually two, which are almost identical, except one of them was NOT a parasite for the particular species they were trying to control. With hundreds of species of parasitic wasps and very few parasitic wasp experts in the world, no one had looked at this one species close enough to have noticed that there were really two species.
The kind of observation and experimentation is takes to learn enough about the insect state machines to make the hormone mimicking pesticides, or to learn enough about an insect's predators or parasites to effectively and safely control the pest biologically, takes a long time. Industry is not interested in funding that. They want entomologists to work on type #1 poisons, not to spend 20 years in the lab studying one species to identify a key hormone.
Academic entomologists who want to pursue these studies aren't pulling in the big grants, either. Evans tells of having to advise a graduate student to NOT specialize in parasitic wasps, despite the student's interest in and talent at it, because he would not be able to get funding for research in that area.
1) Can you provide examples of some experiments which were a bit more conclusive than all that eggshell stuff [1]?
2) I'm not sure, but I think the big problem with this approach is that the pest in question can quickly evolve tolerance for the targeted pesticide. DDT resistance has not prevented astounding success with the recent vector control programs in Namibia and elsewhere. And it is much cheaper than the latest targeted pesticide that Monsanto wants the UN to subsidize.
3) Sounds interesting, but Malaria is not the kind of problem where experimenting with ecosystems and writing academic papers about mosquito predators is really a practical approach. Hundreds of thousands are still dying every year and a simple vector control strategy has been known to work for decades.
Here the submission is not with the canonical URL, which spoofed the duplicate submission detector. It's too bad the previous submission had only one comment, a crap comment, so it's a good thing the article was submitted again.
Not sure where he got 10 wolf deaths per year. The average number of wolf deaths per century is less than that. Not the most relevant comment I suppose, but it makes me curious about his data collection process.
One of the key innovations in the development of the Panama Canal was the fighting of malaria/yellow fever. Without understanding this, the canal wouldn't have been built, and Panama would probably look a lot more like Nicaragua than like Hong Kong.
It's funny[0] that "Number of deaths" = "Number of people killed by animals". Perhaps if humans allowed that the deaths other animals is also of consequence we'd have a healthier relationship with nature. It's ranting about your home being destroyed by a hurricane, especially since you just rebuilt it after last years hurricane. Deaths by malaria and the destruction caused by hurricanes always terrible, but we need to look into mitigating such harm both by working with and against nature (which we are a part of, so I take issue a little bit even making that distinction, but, for the sake of discussion).
Cats carry Toxoplasma gondii, which is estimated to cause 750 deaths each year in the US alone. Around the world it's probably many times that number -- making Felis domesticus responsible (albeit indirectly) for more deaths than lions, elephants, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles combined.
It also influences human behaviour [1] which is probably why the grandparent's post is so massively downvoted ;)
It can also be deadly when it doesn't kill you "The difference in seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis in these 2 samples suggests that Toxoplasma-infected subjects have a 2.65 times higher risk of traffic accidents than Toxoplasma-free subjects"
EDIT: it also suggests an explanation: "the effects of T. gondii are best explained in evolutionary terms by the manipulation hypothesis, ie, the parasite changes the behavior of the rodent in such a way as to increase the chances of the parasite's getting into a feline and completing its life cycle."
Yep, cat people hate when you talk about their beloved pets. I've seen friends parents not wash their hands after playing with cats, after I suggest that they should they think I'm crazy for saying the phrase "brain parasite", even after showing wikipedia articles and suggesting that they look it up themselves.
Crazy cat ladies are undoubtedly infected with the parasite.
There needs to be more public awareness about this. Change your cat's litter-box daily, wash your hands after touching a cat (kittens specifically), be very cautious of outdoor cats, never handle a cat while pregnant or if you have a compromised immune system. Also wash vegetables and cook meat thoroughly.
Even more shocking is the percentage of the human population that is infected, over 30%!
In case you're wondering, I downvoted you for (a) getting needlessly personal and (b) more importantly, wildly overstating the very minor role of cats in spreading toxoplasma, relative to unwashed vegetables and undercooked meat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Risk_factors_...: "Numerous studies have shown living in a household with a cat is not a significant risk factor for T. gondii infection, though living with several kittens has some significance."
It's fine if you don't like cats, but don't try to turn it into a moral crusade.
Oh, yeah: the research that suggests a connection between toxoplasma and feelings about cats shows that it makes men like cats more and women like them less. Your "crazy cat lady" thing has no basis in fact.
"Because T. gondii can sexually reproduce only within cats, they are defined as the definitive host of T. gondii." No cats, no toxoplasma gondii brain parasite.
I have nothing against cats, but the phrase "brain parasite" and the fact that 30+% of the worlds human population are infected scares the shit out of me.
"As of 2013, at least 38 studies have found a positive correlation between T. gondii antibody titers and schizophrenia."
Hippos are very aggressive and territorial. Also, they are surprisingly fast, especially in water. Many wild animals, even predators, won't move towards you unless you come real close. Hippos move towards you even if you just pass by the waterline of the sea that they are in.
Also, Hippos don't kill by biting you. They drown you by dragging you underwater - it's not that they misjudge their force.
Another problem is that they come out at night and like warm underground - streets for example. When I was in Africa last time, there was a horrible street accident with 17 dead as a pickup hit a hippo standing on the road at night. Grey, behind a corner -> bang.
What makes Hippos so dangerous to humans is they we are misjudging them as tame, slow creatures that mind their own thing.
The vast, vast majority of toxoplasma occurs in 3rd world countries, and living with a cat has been shown not to increase chance of catching it at all.
Wiki:
The following have been identified as being risk factors for T. gondii infection:Exposure to or consumption of raw or undercooked meat[18][39][40][41]Drinking unpasteurized goat milk[39]Contact with soil[7][40]Eating unwashed raw vegetables or fruits[18]Cleaning cat litter boxes[18]Sewage has been identified as a carriage medium for the organism.[42][43][44][45]Numerous studies have shown living in a household with a cat is not a significant risk factor for T. gondiiinfection,[18][40][46] though living with several kittens has some significance.[47]
While that's technically true (some countries have numbers as high as 80% infection rates), over 16% of the US human population is infected. That's a very large amount when talking about a brain parasite.
An adult cat might not have a high risk of spreading the parasite but a kitten is a major risk of infection and dropping the parasites in the owners home.
> vast, vast majority of toxoplasma occurs in 3rd world countries
Well. I'm in France, which has a seriously high rate of infection; something around 50%.
>living with a cat has been shown not to increase chance of catching it at all.
But what's in the list of risk factors just below that?
> Contact with soil ... Cleaning cat litter boxes
So, living with a cat is fine as long as someone else changes its litter box, and you stay away from any soil into which your cat might potentially defecate.
You should have done more looking up about toxoplasmosis before starting this subthread. Toxoplasmosis is mostly a food-borne illness, worldwide, and especially in the United States is spread mostly by undercooked food.[1] In any event, the great majority of people infected with this parasite have no symptoms from the infection. (This is true of many infectious diseases; human beings have a well adapted immune system with a deep evolutionary history now that we and our ancestors have been living for millions of years in a world filled with other organisms. Malaria deserves special attention because the parasite is especially harmful to human beings.)
Yup, which humans can pick up if they train their cat to use the same toilet as they do. Incredibly unsanitary. People and animals have separate shit receptacles for a reason.
Please don't spread misinformation. Read my other post, the wiki on toxoplasmosis, or many other reliable sources. Having a pet cat does not increase your chance of toxoplasmosis.
In this survey, 998 children and adolescents between 7 months and 17 years of age who attended a hospital diagnostic center in the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, for routine evaluation were tested for Toxoplasma gondii antibody. The 5.2% prevalence rate of antibody for children living in the outlying rural areas was significantly higher than the 1.1% rate among the urban children (P = .0006). Seroprevalence increased with age for both rural and urban children. Cat ownership was associated with antibodies to Toxoplasma among rural children but not urban children. Rural children who lived in a house with more than one cat were two times more likely to be infected than children who had one cat and three times more likely to be infected than children with no cats. The geometric mean titer was also significantly higher among the rural children with more than one cat, 1:152, than rural children with one or no cats, 1:63 (P = .02). In light of these findings for children and adolescents, the association of Toxoplasma infection with cat ownership needs to be thoroughly evaluated among pregnant women in rural areas.
This study says that owning a cat makes if more likely to have Toxo.
Wikipedia, which the grandparent node quotes, said the opposite. In fact, Wikipedia, correctly links to the study and then gives a summary that's 100% opposite of the actual findings.
numerous studies have shown living in a household with a cat is not a significant risk factor for T. gondiiinfection,[18][40][46]
Interestingly, cats are responsible for toxoplasmosis and it could be fatal in some cases. They also may carry rabies. I am pretty sure cats killed more people than sharks.
I think it was criticized because it required electrical power to run and that would have been a no go in sub-Saharan Africa but I imagine it would work great everywhere else.
The snails harbor a parasitic worm which they pass on to the water supply. The worms then use humans as a host and lay a large amount of eggs in the host. The worms and the eggs themselves cause an enormous strain on the hosts liver, kidneys, digestive, and urinary system. They essentially migrate through the body to get to the liver where they can lay thousands of eggs a day. Most eggs then enter the intestines in order to pass out of the host and back into the water supply to mature in snails and start the cycle over.
The real danger is you don't need to drink the water, just come in contact with it. So stepping in a puddle could cause infection. I was just in Colombia and there was a campaign trying to raise awareness on this so I learned a bunch about it. Scary stuff!
I knew the name of the disease before I started the search, but since you asked for search-fu, I'll mention that I Googled "snail fatal disease," which led to a Wikipedia article[1] and searching the article page for the word "snail" led to the specific section about the disease. The disease name, "schistosomiasis," is of course an even better search term for finding out more information about the disease.
AFTER EDIT: using the same word string from your question here, "how freshwater snails kill humans" (NOT searching as a phrase, but as a string of words) on Google does indeed first bring up the Bill Gates blog post, but a few results below the search results show a World Health Organization document on freshwater snails[2] that largely answers the question.
In a list that's supposed to point out "unexpected" killers, snakes are, interestingly, far and away the deadliest of the animals you'd actually think of when someone says "dangerous animals".
What about a horse? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they caused more human injuries and deaths than many other "dangerous" animals.... or maybe I'm remembering wrong.
I would like to see the exact same graph but having instead as value the humans killed per unit of the animal. I doubt if the mosquito would be on top.
Pretty misleading I'd say.. Malaria kills people, not mosquitos, mosquitos have nothing to do with Malaria. Would be like saying rats are deadly because they carried the plague.
Also I interact with humans every day and I'm still alive.
I understand where it's coming from, but it's more of a historical post-factum analysis rather than a indication of which animals you should stay away from.
That is the same as saying its not the snake that kills you its the poison. Mosquitos do have something to do with Malaria as they carry it, willingly or not. I live in Houston where there are plenty of mosquitos and plenty of mosquito related illnesses/Deaths each year.(West Nile, Bird Flu) Mosquitos are a serious nuisance, and to top it off I am pretty allergic to the bites, mine swell up and itch pretty severely. I would love to see more research put into controlling these things. Regardless of the fact that they are unwitting carriers of Malaria and other disease, they deserve more attention for eradication. Hopefully in a way that doesn't involve blanketing an area with pesticide...
Well, the difference is Malaria is a kind of living being in itself, it uses mosquitos to spread. On the other hand, poison is produced by the snake, and the snake uses it to survive.
Maxing out my pedantry score, the actual answer is "humans" followed by "snakes". Mosquitos themselves are not dangerous, and malaria parasites are not animals.
If a mosquito bite can infect and kill, why isn't a mosquito dangerous?
Alternately, if I take your logic that "mosquitoes themselves are not dangerous", why can I not extend that to humans and say human beings themselves are not dangerous?
> If a mosquito bite can infect and kill, why isn't a mosquito dangerous?
Because it's not the mosquito itself doing that (as opposed to, say, a rattlesnake), it's a parasite hitching a ride on an "innocent" (of that anyway) mosquito. Much like e.g. bats and henipaviruses, bats are a resevoir species but nobody in their right mind would say that Mark Preston was killed by a fruitbat.
Is there a difference though? A snake is a vehicle for delivering poison, which is a chemical compound disrupting your biological machinery. A mosquito is a vehicle for delivering pieces of biological machinery that disrupt your own biological machinery.
The snake kills in the same way the mosquito does. The snake's poison kills in the same way malaria parasites do. Both statements are true, they're just operating on different abstraction levels.
> A snake is a vehicle for delivering poison, which is a chemical compound disrupting your biological machinery.
The poison is the snake's own weapon and defence, not a hitch-hiker, and poison delivery is part of a snake's normal bite process (if the snake is poisonous).
> A mosquito is a vehicle for delivering pieces of biological machinery that disrupt your own biological machinery.
No, the mosquito itself delivers some saliva and draws blood, that somebody else takes advantage of this can hardly be ascribed to the mosquito's fault. Again, compare to other reservoirs, or to a dog giving you rabies. The dog didn't kill you, rabies did, the dog was the unwitting carrier of the infection rabies is not a weaponised dog secretion.
When you're shot dead I'll be sure to point out to the investigating police that you don't consider killers to be dangerous as ultimately it was the gun rather than the killer that caused your death.
"[...] malaria [...] threatens half of the world’s population and causes billions of dollars in lost productivity annually."
billions of dollars in lost productivity?!?!?
NOTE: Not in healthcare. Because there's no health-care Central Africa where malaria does the biggest damage. It causes billions of dollars in lost productivity. Now we need to cure it.
> What makes mosquitoes so dangerous? Despite their innocuous-sounding name—Spanish for “little fly”—they carry devastating diseases.
Spanish for "little fly" could be "mosquita", a diminutive of "mosca" (fly). Mosquito is the spanish term for mosquito. While mosquito and mosca share the same latin origin "musca" i dont think any spanish speaker will understand mosquito as little fly.
Just a nitpick in case you were going to amaze someone with magazine learned spanish terms.
I genuinely dislike writing such harsh comments, and in this case have let the frustration of seeing this comment as the top-rated one on an otherwise discussion-worthy topic boil over.
What about consulting the actual, present day, normative instead of the middle age origin?
Because one's the reason it got its name, and the other's day-to-day speech?
Sorry about frustrating you, and i mean it.
No worries, and I'm sorry if I caused anything on my part.
I read your comment as picking holes in an article purely for the sake of picking holes, which is something I find frustrating waaaaay out of proportion.
The etymology of the word, while interesting, is not relevant to my assertion. I only said that "Mosquito" is NOT the spanish word for "small fly". Not normative, and not day-to-day speech.
I did not want to pick holes, and it also bothers me sometimes, but the first sentence of the writing had a glaring error that caught my attention. I do think you tried to pick holes on my hole picking.
I linked you to the normative, actual definition of mosquito, because that's what you need to use to prove me wrong. Not the 1600 definition.
How is that? The roots of a word and its current meaning may differ greatly. You can take mosquito as an example, wich originated at "small fly" but now it means "the blood sucker insect".
Consider for example the word "Musket", you wouldn't be here debating that a musket is a fly, right?. Well, both share the same latin origin in musca, like mosquito. That's my point.
Actually, it is a diminutive for "mosco", which comes from "mosca". No Spanish speaker I know of (myself included) has trouble understanding mosquito as little fly.
Yes, mosquito it is a dimitive for "mosco", that comes from latin "musca". Sharing a latin root doesn't make them mean the same.
If you understand mosquito as "little fly", then how do you call actual mosquitos? Im from spain. I can assure you no one here will take the word mosquito for other than the blood sucker insect.
Don't say you are wrong, probably this is about diferent spanish usage since it varies from country to country and even more from continent to continent.
Sorry, but this has nothing to do with our dialects.
You were contending that the etymology of "mosquito" can't be understood as Spanish for "little fly", which is untrue. See, "fly" is not a biological term, but a colloquial one, and describes a wide range of species (suborders, actually). So "mosquito", which originally was meant in Spanish as "pequeño mosco", could perfectly be translated as "little fly", for "mosco" is a type of "fly" and can be translated as such (as is the case of "moscón", "moscarda", "moscardón"...)
> if you understand mosquito as "little fly", then how do you call actual mosquitos?
"Mosquitos". Because context. Just as I can know "bolsillo" means "pequeño bolso" (small bag) and cigarrillo means "pequeño cigarro" (small cigar), and simultaneously understand them as the envelope-like receptacle in clothing (pocket) and paper wrapped processed tobacco (cigarette), respectively.
There is no definition there stating that a mosquito is a small fly, (hint: derived diminutives don't make it into the rae dictionary). What you can see there is that the etymology is indeed from the diminutive of mosco. I never denied that, it's on my original post, they share latin root. Again, that doesn't make them mean the same.
You examples are so weird I highly doubt you are a native spanish speaker. Bolsillo is never used for a small bag, at least here, and cigarrillo is never used as cigar, but as cigarrete.
There's no need for a dictionary definition. Just as you just said, diminutives don't normally make it into the dictionary. So, "suelecillo" is a word for "suelo pequeño" whether or not it's included in the dictionary, whether or not you use it regularly. But the reverse is also true. "Bolsillo" is a "small bag", whether or not it has developed a specific meaning that grants it a separate definition in the dictionary.
And whether or not you use it regularly with the original meaning. The frequency of usage does not invalidate this truth: the rules of diminutive formation entail that "bolsillo" is "bolso pequeño". There's no arguing this statement. Just as "mosquito" is "mosco pequeño", i.e. "small fly".
The same can be said for plenty of other words. Words that have developed a specific separate meaning but are still diminutives for the non-affixed original word. Meet polysemy.
Sorry, but "cochinilla" is still "cochina pequeña", "cabezón" is still "cabeza grande", "cabecilla" is still "cabeza pequeña", and "frailecillo" is still "pequeño fraile".
It would be mistaken and a bit obtuse to nitpick on an article which states that "cabecilla" is Spanish for "small head" by contending that no, it means "leader".
Don't say you are wrong, probably this is about diferent spanish usage since it varies from country to country and even more from continent to continent.
Daily language use is a very different thing to etymology.
Let me give you an example:
I'm learning Polish as a second language, and I love, love, love the Polish word for whale: wieloryb.
Why?
It's a contraction of the words for great/large and fish: wielki + ryba = wieloryb. Isn't that cute?
No Pole in their right mind thinks of "great fish" when you say "whale;" that's clearly nonsense.
And yet despite this, the history of the word remains.
Spain. I have a colombiano friend and I've heard zancudo often, but not mosco. Never mind, I'm going to use mosco exclusively from now on to annoy fellow spaniards, it's catchy :-)
The diminutive can be -ita or -ito depending on gender.
They may understand it as "mosquito" rather than "little fly" but that is a valid literal translation, just like "gatito" is "kitten" but the literal translation would be diminutive-of-cat -> "little cat".
Mosca has no male form, it would be a female mosca, or a male mosca. That's probably the origin of the mistake with the article. While the gatito example is ok, there is no mosco for mosca.
I'm a native spanish speaker from Venezuela and I can tell you that where I'm from "Mosquito" is not seen as a diminutive of "Mosca", since, like you say, the correct form to say "little fly" would be "Mosquita". So, you're right.
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-Malaria-Feels-Like-Mos...
Imagine feeling like that and trying to go to school, work, or take care of your family. It would be impossible. It's undoubtedly contributed to the lack of development in most of Africa.