Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sametmax 3135 days ago
However, i fail to see what the big deal about it. I have yet to meet a flat earther irl, and i doubt they have great influence over our society.

They are a curiosity at best.

We have way more dangerous and widespread believes.

Like: did you know there is a way to cure malaria ? Cause i had malaria for years and everybody i knew, including my doctors and myself, believed it couldn't be cured.

And then i meet a guy from the pasteur institute (in france you can't get more serious than that, they are the nasa of biology) who told me that they had a perfectly fine protocol to kill the parasite in the liver for years. And using nothing more that regular malaron. So i went to the institute and indeed, they do.

Our society is working on a pile of false informations, obsolete data, incomplete thruths and lies. All with major consequences. It's human nature.

Flat earth it the least important of it. I'd say it's even a good thing cause it helps revealing very confused people or flaws in our educational system.

2 comments

I have met one serious flat-earther (working as a QA engineer funnily enough) and I think they may be more common than you think. The person had clearly easily impressionable personality as well as a 'there must be someone behind this' sort of personality which as we've recently seen, is quite common in western society. Furthermore, he at least had an intellectual confidence to share this view ("I know this sounds ridiculous but you should check it out") and many might not. I guess what I mean is flat-earthism is just a symptom of something quite common.
When i lived in mali, a cab driver told me he wasn't afraid of aids cause it was well known you could be cured by making love to a virgin. There is no mysterious mechanism here. Just human nature.
How does one find these virgins and then make love to them? Does it involve force?
Unfortunately yes, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_cleansing_myth

People are so screwed up.

Do you have a link to more information on that protocol, or a name for it or something? I'm striking out trying to find it. Thanks!
From the WHO's "Guidelines for the treatment of malaria", third edition [1]:

"Radical cure. This term refers to both cure of blood-stage infection and prevention of relapses by killing hypnozoites (in P. vivax and P. ovale infections only)." (p. 4)

"The objective of treating malaria caused by P. vivax and P. ovale is to cure both blood-stage and liver-stage infections (called radical cure), thereby preventing recrudescence and relapse, respectively." (p. 61)

"The recommended treatment for radical cure of P. ovale relapsing malaria is the same as that for P. vivax, i.e. ACT or chloroquine combined with primaquine (total dose, 3.5 mg base/kg bw). [...] P. malariae and P. knowlesi do not form hypnozoites and so do not require radical cure with primaquine." (p. 290)

There's nothing there about P. falciparum, the major malaria parasite, but my understanding is that that also doesn't have a hypnozoite stage.

A recent paper "Challenges for achieving safe and effective radical cure of Plasmodium vivax" [2] suggests that this approach is well-accepted, but not yet a slam-dunk in the field.

[1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/162441/1/9789241549...

[2] https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

You won't, that's my point. Malaron is sold as a preventive drug, not a curratvie one. However, i can give you the contact of the tropical disease specialist that i saw, which in turn may give you more informations.