432
‘Zombie deer disease’ epidemic spreads in Yellowstone as scientists raise fears it may jump to humans
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
432 points (98.4% liked)
News
23267 readers
2981 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
By this logic because there is infinite time and infinite possibilities, we could develop a cure or a virus that kills this prion and avert this crisis. We could also not and just die. Then there is a possibility that none of this exists and this is a simulation and the developers haven't added this as a feature yet.
Earth v.AD2024.1.1 - Began "Zombie Deer Event" on North American Servers
Earth v.AD2024.1.2 - Fixed bug where "Zombie" status would not jump species
Earth v.AD2024.1.8 - Reduced "Zombie" status infliction rate as players intentionally ate tainted meat to spite developers
Yup. Precisely.
My main point is that, in general, it is better to prepare for the more problematic eventualities than to go "nuh uh, that isn't going to happen. Everything is going to be fine. Don't touch my cheese."
That is not the debated point. The point is that winning the lottery is just as much not a question of time.
I feel like you are missing the point.
People win the lottery every day.
There are far more CWD prions than lottery players, and it would only take one of those prions to mutate into a form that could infect humans.
Again, I will reiterate, putting on a blindfold, putting your fingers in your ears and going "it won't happen, lalala!" is a pretty dumb way to approach it.
We just saw the masses do it with Covid.
We had a novel disease, we just needed to behave for a couple months, the sweeping majority did, but the remainder of fuck-nuts out there went "it's not a problem, lalala!" and now we have endemic covid, sweeping segments of the population struggling with long covid, infection rates are going through the roof again, and now new even more severe consequences like epilepsy are showing up in children post infection.
2 of the rules of life. 1) Microorganisms will mutate. 2) People will be aggressively ignorant and will make sure the mutated microorganism will do as much damage as possible. Because they certainly cant miss that Blink 182 reunion tour...
It could happen, the same way a specific person could win the lottery. But it is not a question of time. It could also not happen in 100 billion years, even if the chance of that is essentially 0. But it is not exactly 0. Time only increases the chance, it does not guarantee it. That is the difference between statistical and deterministic events.