Anorexia is just medico speak for not wanna eat. Anorexia nervosa is a specific condition, anorexia is a symptom.
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the plague made me irritable AF after a few days. It was low grade stuff, nothing major, but it kept grinding away. Just got soooo fucking sick and tired of being sick and tired, y’know?
ETA I have had it with this planet, so many of its people, the heat, the pandemics…I wanna drink endless boozy horchatas and remain in their haze until all this stupid shit gets better.
Ooh, and smoke Horchata, too!
Yummy stuff!
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Stay away from shrews.
That’s some sound advice right there.
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I am choosing to take the optimistic view and say that the fact that we are hearing about this in such an early state and that clearly international authorities are aware and monitoring the situation is a sign that we have learned our lesson.
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A combination of climate change, poor health and handling safety protocols in the “wet markets”, and extremely large and cramped cities, I’d speculate. Plus a high amount of internal and international travel originating in those cities.
Really, though, we’ll see similar situations in the coming years of global warming in a lot of other countries where urbanisation is outpacing proper enforcement or existence of modern regulations. And a bunch of plagues are still waiting under the thawing permafrost too.
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Yep - reasonable speculation.
But then there’s India with a similar profile. Or have they long since largely encroached as far as they can?
I’m afraid I do suspect the Chinese appetite for a hugely wider range of animal meat has something to do with it. (And there’s a lot more vegetarianism in India, I believe.)
@gracchus and there was me merely worried about the methane under the permafrost. Sigh. But the rate of encroachment in the Amazon basin would surely have brought forth something by now, although much of that is agricultural rather than urban. I suspect your first paragraph is on the nose.
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Came here to post this. Bravo.
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It’s complicated, but it isn’t and won’t always be China. Global hotspots and correlates of emerging zoonotic diseases | Nature Communications
From the article:
Our results suggest that emerging infectious disease events are best predicted by the distribution of tropical forested regions, higher mammalian species richness, and variables relating to shifts in agricultural land use; and appear to occur more often in tropical regions
.
China happens to meet a lot of those criteria.
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Glad to be of service!
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Just speculating here, but it may also be a case of increased monitoring. China has been pretty vigorous about monitoring for this stuff since they have a long history of zoonotic breakouts (SARS, MERS, etc). They have a much more robust public health infrastructure, combined with an authoritarian government, neither of which India has. It may be simply that small outbreaks happen and burn out in other dense countries that we don’t know about.
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Problem is, there was always someone taking it seriously at the early stages. I’ve read about outbreaks of novel zoonotic viruses regularly in the last couple decades that got nipped in the bud - and then COVID still happened.
We’ve stopped taking the current pandemic seriously (as it continues to kill tens of thousands of people a week in the US), much less have we done anything on the list that epidemiologists put together of what we needed to do to prepare for pandemic(s) that existed before that. We’re just going to be paying more attention as the next virus pops up to kill us all, but our response will be just as woefully inadequate.
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I don’t believe that. There’s more money in vaccines than ever and international organisations like the WHO, who have always monitored such things, have more robust systems and are listened to by national governments more than ever. ICUs and PPE are more available than ever before, on a huge scale previously unimagined. Every government in the world has a pandemic task force. Epidemiologists are voted into public office (the German health minister is one). There’s money available for pandemic research, for early warning systems and for research networking (even if the EU’s framework has the most sinister logo I have ever seen for a public health programme… see below).
The average person on a US street may not care anymore, but the professionals who count do, and there’s more of them and they’re better supported than ever before.
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The current Indian government certainly aspires to building an authoritarian ethnostate. In any case, don’t assume that authoritarian or dictatorial governments are efficient at anything except suppressing dissent.
To quote from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.”
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Because it is the largest population country, one of the largest by area, has substantial internal migration, a variety of climates, a large urban/wild interface, and a moderately advanced disease monitoring infrastructure.
But also, it just isn’t always China, the media is just more likely to pin the country of origin to their stories when it is China. To pluck an example from the news monkeypox is endemic in parts of west Africa. MERS was first spotted in Saudi Arabia. Zika was first isolated in Uganda, but it was the outbreaks in the Americas that made the news.
India’s had a terrifying unexplained acute encephalitis outbreak. Also while Nipah virus was first spotted in Malaysia, the Indian outbreak looks like it could be the one that takes it global. There’s the other issue with India, because of how trade and the history of colonialism played out, a lot of the endemic diseases of India already hit the global media stage. Some time has passed, so no one applies national labels, but Cholera certainly made an impact and the original reservoir was the Ganges delta.
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