alt Hacker NewsA deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
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> “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.
The article doesn't address treatment efficacy in humans. How is it treated? How effective is the treatment? Can this develop resistance to the treatment? The spread mechanisms and persistence are concerning, but without info on treatment I'm not sure how much I should freak out about this.
Here’s the website (in Portuguese) from the Brazilian Ministry of Health: https://www.gov.br/saude/pt-br/assuntos/saude-de-a-a-z/e/esp...
It includes instructions for the general population and for medical professionals, as well as a couple of technical reports with tons of references to recent studies.
Deadly to immunocompromised people. Basically everything could be deadly to them. Cats also rarely attack human proactively. So not really a big concern.
Can survive weeks, months and even years??
That’s a little horrifying.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)
Please note that this is an extremely rare disease even in Brazil, where it came from. Asked my vet, and two cousins who also are vets, and all of them knew of the disease from scientific literature and government health bulletins, but only one of them had treated two actual cases, when he lived in northeastern region: two strays.
Brasil must have something like between 40 and 50 million cats (including strays). An infectious disease that killed thousands (what the article means? 1000, 2000? 10000?) while not ignorable, it is not exactly highly prevalent.
"We report the first three cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis outside South America, and the first ever cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis *in the United Kingdom*".
Why are we allowing immigrant cats into the country?
>infect cats
No! We must stop this at all costs
>and people
Eh, all right then. If it takes the cats out at least we'd be going with them
can fungals go pandemic?
lol
We need lock downs, a wall, 100% containment. Full vaccine mobilization. Starship must be expedited. A world without cats is not a world at all.
So a disease that has killed 11,000 people in a country with a population of >200 million over 30 years is a ‘ginormous outbreak’?
This kind of hyper-scary overreaction from the CDC official being quoted and other government agents is a big cause of the current loss of trust in those institutions.
A few years ago monkeypox was gonna kill all of us and our dogs, I get “extreme heat” and “severe weather” warnings for days where the weather is 20* below the annual peak in my home town, and now a fungus is going to kill me and my cats.
Ok boomer - just stop worrying please?
It's hard to take an article that uses the word 'ginormous' seriously
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.
We will see more and more fungi infecting mammals in the coming years. Mammals and birds evolved higher body temperatures in part to protect from fungal infections. As most fungi are dying above 37°C. But a high temperature summer is a selection pressure on any mushroom trying to survive, and hence might evolve to survive 40° summers and thus also survive in our bodies.
I really hope cordyceps is one of the last to do this step.