An interesting article here covering several different diseases, two of which follow:
Ulcers form on the mouth, slowly eating away at the flesh until only yellowing teeth and jaw bone is visible.
This is… a condition called noma which still kills 90 per cent of impoverished children who catch it.
Mostly found in Asia and Africa, bacteria gets into the body as a result of poor hygiene or contaminated water, causing the flesh on face to become gangrenous and wither away…
This is a fungal infection capable of spreading all throughout the body but is typically found on the legs and feet.
Initially one suffering from this disease will notice a swelling on the foot, followed by a discharge of pus.
The fungus then spreads, causing huge eruptions all over the appendage and serious damage to the surrounding tissue….
Although it is endemic in Africa, India and the Central and South Americas, it has also been found in southern US states and in homeless people or those suffering HIV…
Nice pictures at the link.
Notice how much is out there, constantly pushing to gain entrance to the human race. It is not surprising. Humans are a big lump of meat walking around, immersing themselves in different microbial ecosystems all the time. I’m amazed that we aren’t consumed by the bacteria in our own gastrointestinal tract.
So long as almost all humans are healthy and well nourished though, diseases such as these rarely gain entrance to the population. However if resources snap back, stress piles up, and humans are systemically weakened, then these microbes will begin to regularly gain entrance to the weakest humans. Each time they do, they will produce mutations, and that means better ways to infect humans and overcome the immune system. That is what creates a game of chance, and begins to skew the odds against us.
This explosion of disease at the Apocalypse has happened regularly throughout history, but never before has global travel given every disease on the entire globe immediate access to the entirely of the human population.
This turn of the cycle may still have a surprise up its sleeve.
[…] Diseases Of the Apocalypse? […]
We are, and it starts as soon as we die.
We aren’t even a big bag of meat, we are an entire biome. We have constant (beneficial) colonies of bacteria on our skin, in our hair, and in our gut. We couldn’t get the fuel for respiration without the assistance of our gut biome. Recently, we discovered a new anatomical feature that hadn’t been discovered in 400 years of anatomy — a part of the limbic system linking the gut with the brain. There’s ample evidence that the activity of our gut biome literally influences our thinking and emotions. There’s an emotional superhighway between your colon and your amygdala that we didn’t even know about until a couple of years ago.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4367209/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845678/
I avoid getting hippie-dippie on food, but I think that a lot of what we are seeing goes right back to our diet. We’ve made a few crucial errors on diet, and they’re changing us for the worse. The first thing we’ve done is that we no longer feed our gut. It runs best on resistant starch. That’s what the beneficial bacteria in our gut rely on. They can eat fiber, but they prefer resistant starch. We don’t get much anymore. We keep all of our starch hot and fluffy, and it doesn’t recrystallize to RS. About the only RS anyone eats anymore is potato chips.
Add into that the things that we’ve done on the always-was-complete-bullshit “fat is bad” line, and we’ve destroyed our diet. We’ve taken the fat out of our foods, replaced it with starch and sugar, and then wondered why we keep getting fat.
You want to push yourself towards K selection? Make as much of your diet as possible whole foods. And I don’t mean going down to the hippie store and buying an expensive frozen dinner. I mean food that comes to you in the most basic form possible. Meat, vegetables, etc. Start fermenting your own foods — pickles, sauerkraut (I thought I hated kraut until we made our own). Make your own bread, and use a method that takes at least overnight on the counter, so that the bread ferments.
Between getting rid of the processed bullshit, bringing back the things that have been processed out, and actually having to do the work to make your food edible, you’ll find yourself thinking like a wolf in no time.
Speaking of diseases, an something I’ve put in the comments before, the 2 things that improved human life expectancy the most in recent (last 200 years) has been better diet and better sanitation.
Which got me to thinking. If a key characteristic of r is lots of children, and a ‘who cares’ attitude towards raising them, while a key of K is lower quanity of children with higher energy costs on child rearing, then the mass increases of population from about 1800 onward has been driven by K creativeness, but resulted in a MASSIVE r shift, as they’d out compete for resources in a free resource environment.
Seriously the population going from about 2 billion to 7 billion (or more) in the last 100 years is a huge jump.