> “I’m convinced that half of the human cases that come from cats are people who are trying to stuff pills down their cat’s throats to treat the sporotrichosis,”
Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food. Problem solved. Difficult with multiple cats but I had two and one needed medication so I put this little guys on a window sill he loved to perch on which the other cat didn't care to reach.
A. I have cats that don't go anywhere special that the other cats don't go so that doesn't work unless I supervise.
B. It's difficult to make sure they get the entire dose, again unless you supervise. And good luck getting a cat to finish food they've decided they are done with.
C. I have cats that are picky enough to ignore any food that has a crushed pill in it. They can always tell. Yes even if I use smelly food.
D. Not all medications can be safely crushed. Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery.
I think quoting is fine, but it's surprising coming from a senior adviser at a U.S. Government department.
> “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.
Deadly to immunocompromised people. Basically everything could be deadly to them. Cats also rarely attack human proactively. So not really a big concern.
Reminds me of the TV Series "The Last of us" [0], which: "... is set decades after the collapse of society caused by a mass fungal infection that transforms its hosts into zombie-like creatures". Of course, minus the zombies.
I guess GP is hinting that referring to TLoS as a TV series is like referring to LotR as a movie series (when discussing the basic premise shared by both)
Everything is spreading. We're a large interconnected world, and we'll inherit everyone's problems eventually. There are better alternatives, but it's not something people will seriously consider.
A system that prices in cost of negative externalities is better than what we have now. A system that caps how much wealth a person can have is a better system that what we now have. A system that prevents the exportation of pollution is a better system than what we have now.
These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.
Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.
Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.
Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food. Problem solved. Difficult with multiple cats but I had two and one needed medication so I put this little guys on a window sill he loved to perch on which the other cat didn't care to reach.