A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Also, the Black Plague has not been eradicated. It still exists in small mammals such as gophers and rats, and a strain could potentially mutate to humans again, although changes in human hygiene have made blood to blood infections less common.
The reason it seemed to disappear is because the more infectious and fatal strains spread to and killed off every susceptible human at a rate that could not support its propagation to new healthy humans.
It actually still exists in people too, it's just rare and treatable with antibiotics.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/seriously-dont-worry-about-the-plague
Plague: Then vs now
I assume you mean well, but this is serious "confidently incorrect" energy. Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague, never changed to become less virulent and can still affect humans to this day. It has been killing a ton of humans for thousands of years and was still killing thousands of people at a time in localized outbreaks up until we discovered the antibiotics that cure it.
Also, it's transmitted through the fleas on small mammals, not through the mammals themselves. Flea transmission is far and away the primary vector. Human to human transmission has always been pretty rare, since it can only be transmitted between humans through contact with bodily fluids, similar to how HIV spreads.
It didn't disappear btw. The black death wasn't 1 round of disease that killed everyone. There were waves of it and the big one in Europe wasn't the first or last deadly outbreak. It is still around but thanks to antibiotics it is mostly a non issue.
When I was stationed in Colorado, we were doing our exercise in an open field of grass, rolling around, doing push-ups and sit-ups etc, when someone ran up and told the person running the formation that we needed to move because plague had been discovered in the prairie dog droppings all over the base, just like the ones we were apparently rolling around in
Fun times
Right, we still regularly have cases.
Just completely ignores history, changes in human hygiene, and developments in medicine that weren't vaccines ("let's just ignore antiserums, sulphonamides, and streptomycin!").
The word "quarantine" originates from a Venetian policy that every single ship had to wait outside of port for 40 days to ensure nobody had the plague. I'm sure the antivax people would have no problem with such measures?
"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
These people would care more if they personally get hurt.
That why a rhetorical tool that personalizes death may work.
Something like "okay, your mother is now dead. And now your wife, and auntie and even your old highschool girlfriend. You watch them all die, bewildered and distraught, but you do nothing until your son dies in front of you, choking on a resporator, pleading in his eyes until the very end."
"You can stop the rest of your family dying right now right now, right way. you can even save your own life, in a way that will also save other peoples mothers, wifes, and sons. Will you?"
It hasn't disappeared. It's still exists, it's just that if you get it modern antibiotics can kill it.
You still have a 5-15% chance of dying with modern antibiotics.
It's the improvement in sanitary practices that ultimately made it a much lesser issue.
It also killed between 10% and 100% (average of a 3rd or so) of populated areas every 10 years for about 600 years. So ~3x longer than the US has been around.
But I assume that nobody at the time had autism, because they were not vaccinated. Worth it!^/s^
That's because Tylenol didn't exist yet
Also it hasn't disappeared. You can friggin catch it right now if you want
So sick of seeing confidently incorrect people opining, using historical examples, when they have never before cracked open a history book and have no idea of the context.
So sick of seeing confidently incorrect people opining, using historical examples, when they have never before cracked open a history book and have no idea of the context.
This has always been the case through history.
The issue is Twitter boosts them over less engaging experts. The new problem is the medium. Twitter is not a fair forum, and these takes trend deliberately.
...And I think its really important for scientists (or anyone who believes in science) to recognize that. With all due respect, I do not understand, with everything that's happened, why they still keep using Twitter.
Legitimately, what else would they use? Hardly anyone uses Mastodon - I don't for sure, but from what I hear, the devs continually ignore the needs that people keep asking about. Which is why so many turned to Bluesky - it works.
To discuss the Threadiverse that I am much more familiar with, literally 100% of the people that I've told about "Lemmy" have outright chided me for having told them about it. (1) If you Google'd that term (not DuckDuckGo, I'm talking mainstream normies here) a year ago, it would take you to lemmy.ml; (2) that instance by default does not show All, but rather Local; (3) lemmy.ml - along with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net - routinely calls for the murder of everyone participating in a capitalist, Western society (Edit: not just billionaires, or even millionaires, but anyone who participates). And showing Local rather than All does not dilute that flood as much as you see your view of the Threadiverse content from lemmy.world. (4) no major Lemmy instances defederate from lemmy.ml (quokk.au did iirc, before it switched all the way over to PieFed).
There are some MAJOR structural issues with the Fediverse that need to be solved first, before mainstream normies - who remember are primarily centrist (aka liberal to even right-wing by the standards here) - will feel comfortable here. Not celebrating and calling for their literal irl murder might be a start. (Note that while YOU might have such communities and user accounts blocked, a guest account, especially browsing lemmy.ml, cannot and would not know how to deal with such - e.g. a new account on most instances could respond to comments in Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net while browsing All and have no idea what they are walking into... then noping out and worst of all, telling everyone that will listen how extremist we are here)
We are a Nazi bar here, except instead of Nazis it's tankies. Also, purity beatings will continue until morale improves. Mainstream people do not feel welcomed here. And most people seem unable to even say so much as they should be? Would you want more "right-wing" people here? (I actually mean centrists, but especially in the USA where so many are located, that is more where they would lean, right?)
Edit: so to answer your question, they use Xhitter the same way that we use the Threadiverse - by blocking early and blocking often, and putting up with what the remainder of stuff that they do not like, in order to make some use of what is freely offered to them, especially requiring minimal efforts to overcome their existing inertia.
The Black Plague was truly a horror, but it DID break the back of Catholicism in Europe, so that's nice. Every cloud has a silver lining
It broke feudalism, too, and kickstarted the renaissance.
I worked at a zoo for a bit and whenever we went in the prairie dogs enclosure we had to wear lowkey hazmat and fully sanitize before & after bc they can carry it
It did not disappear. It's still posting on social media.
Kind of rude to talk about Kanye like that
Also it didn't disappear?
These people are just willfully ignorant and deeply faithful.
Uhhh penecilin? Also i think its still around, its just easilly treatable
Exactly this. Not only did it essentially wipe out entire populations and even drastically alter the course of civilizations (repeatedly), it has not "disappeared." It is still endemic in mammalian (mostly rodent+flea) populations in some areas including in the US. Every year there are people who get infected with it. I think it's an average of like 7 people per year in the US, but as usual, countries more heavily exploited by the US and its vassals get it worse. Hundreds of cases per year in DRC for example. It's hasn't "disappeared," this antivaxxer nitwit just doesn't know about it because modern medicine has made it treatable and precluded its ability to spread as it did in previous centuries.
The black plague is common in Madagascar for example, in villages which can't be ~~reqxhes~~ accessed without a helicopter and people there have no money for antibiotics. So doctors without borders are doing there best, but it's still there (among other places). The vaccine for spreading misinformation is education, but sadly people prefer to get their knowledge from tiktok while letting AI do their school work, if they go to school at all.
Edit: typo
Wouldn’t the proper follow up have been: ”and so did 1/3 of Europe”?
where it kept coming back periodically for 500 years
Funny thing is the bubonic plague still kills people in the US every year still today, just in small numbers.
It also disappeared without plumbed toilets and water purification.
At first I attributed this to dumbfuckery but lately I'm again seeing more of these opinions but now from people who see it as an opportunity