Many of the worst human diseases were created by proximity to animals. Cattle provided the pathogen pool with tuberculosis and viral poxes like smallpox. Pigs and ducks gave humans their influenzas, while horses brought rhinoviruses and hence the common cold. Measles, which still kills a million children a year, is the result of rinderpest (canine distemper) jumping between dogs or cattle and humans. Moreover, cats, dogs, ducks, hens, mice, rats, and reptiles carry bacteria like salmonella, leading often to fatal human infections; water polluted with animal faeces also spreads polio, cholera, typhoid, viral hepatitis, whooping cough and diphtheria.

- The greatest benefit to mankind, by Roy Porter

Moreover, though agriculture enabled more mouths to be fed, it meant undue reliance on starchy cereal monocultures like maize, high in calories but low in proteins, vitamins and minerals; reduced nutritional levels allowed deficiency diseases like pellagra, marasmus, kwashiorkor and scurvy to make their entry onto the human stage. Stunted people are more vulnerable to infections, and it is a striking comment on 'progress' that neolithic skeletons are typically some inches shorter than their paleolithic precursors.

- The greatest benefit to mankind, by Roy Porter

Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine

شلون اكتشفنا أول لقاح بالعالم:

Tapeworms😂

الديدان الشريطية، طفيليات تعيش بالامعاء وممكن يوصل طولها للأمتار وتتغذى على الأكل اللي انت تاكله...

أخاف الجلوس مع نفسي . بيننا التزامات هائلة !

‏- علي عكور

The word 'parasite' meant someone who shared one’s food in return for providing amusement and flattery. The ‘parasitus ridiculus’ was a popular character in Greek and early Roman comedies and they even had joke books to help them should they run out of witticisms. The greed of the parasite was a constant source of fun for dramatists and he was often given crude nicknames such as ‘little brush–because he swept the table clean’.

لازم اعترف، الـ parasitology طلع أحلى مما توقعت

*مرتضى يضحك ضحكة شريرة in the background*

Humans are extremely adaptable creatures and will survive under remarkably harsh environmental and political regimes. This adaptability can degenerate into acceptance and complacency on the parts of both individuals and governments. Because parasitic diseases are so prevalent in developing countries, there is a tendency not to prioritise them: periodic fevers and diarrhoea become an accepted part of everyday life. Furthermore, parasitic diseases tend to cause chronic disease and although the patient may ultimately die, the condition does not capture the attention of the local or world media.

نحن البشر كائنات قابلة للتكيّف بشكل كبير ويمكننا النجاة في ظروفٍ بيئية وسياسية قاسية جدًا. لكنّ القدرة على التكيّف يمكن أنْ تتحول إلى انحطاط يتمثّل بالتقبّل والقناعة بالواقع.

Why the Ebola virus became as famous as the Kardashians?

The Ebola virus is well known in the developed world because of its appalling pathology and images of patients being treated by nurses and doctors dressed in spacesuit-like protective clothing. However, although the Ebola virus causes about 70% mortality, the numbers of people who have actually died of the infection are relatively few.
The fact that Ebola virus has been touted as a possible biological warfare agent has also helped to engender interest in the disease and funds to study and control it. By comparison, Human African Trypanosomiasis (often referred to as ‘sleeping sickness’) causes 100% mortality if untreated and kills many more people than Ebola but is seldom mentioned in the media. The reason is simple, Human African Trypanosomiasis kills slowly by comparison and those who suffer are among the poorest in Africa and live in some of the most war-torn and disorganised regions of the continent.

Dysentery has long been known as a ‘handmaiden of war’, often inflicting more casualties than bullets and bombs. Accounts of epidemics of dysentery accompany nearly every account of war from antiquity to the present day.

تروح للحرب، ما تموت بطلقة، تموت بمغص...

World's tallest trees