Look, I paraphrased Mercutio in two of my headlines over the last three days!

I’m writing this blog post‒wait for it!‒on the desktop computer at the office, because I slept at the office last night.  I had stayed after work to do a Discord meetup with my youngest to watch some Doctor Who.  We watched the first two of the “David Tennant specials”.  Those of you who are fans of Doctor Who will recognize that one of the episodes we watched was The Waters of Mars, which is among the best episodes of the show.

Anyway, after that, it was late enough that it made no sense to go all the way back to the house, since I was working in the morning (now today) and would just have to come right back.  The cats will be fine for 24 hours, and honestly, I feel rather pleased that the raccoons will not be able to come in and steal the “leftover” cat food.

Do raccoons deserve to eat any less than cats do?  Of course not.  But I don’t buy food to feed raccoons, I buy it to feed cats.  I wish I could take a cat in as a pet, but my allergies in general are already a pain in the ass‒well, more a pain in the head and chest, but that’s not the idiom‒just from living in Florida, where there is so much airborne life that if you stand still for too long, things will start to grow on you.

And I don’t figuratively mean by that that you’ll begin to become accustomed to them and might begin to like them.  I literally mean that you’ll begin to develop moss and algae and fungi and possibly even a lichen or two on your skin*.

If there ever is a cordyceps-style fungus that takes over human nervous systems the way some species hijack the nervous systems of various insects and other arthropods, it will probably start in someplace like south Florida.  Actually, maybe there already is such a fungus, but it’s not some rapidly growing, zombie-creating thing like in The Last of Us (or so I’m told).  Maybe it just makes people weird, particularly at the level of government.

That would make more sense than a fungus that makes people want to go around and, I don’t know, eat other people or try to infect them or something‒I haven’t played the game or seen the show or whatever, so I don’t know for sure what happens‒because fungi grow slowly.  Even ants can recognize the signs of an infected member of the colony and work aggressively to drive it out.  That doesn’t stop spores from spreading from the fruiting body that eventually grows out of the poor critter after it dies, and the spores get into the wind and go on.  But it does protect the ants locally.

Humans are rather cleverer about such things even than ants, believe it or not.  If there were a fungus that caused bizarre and violent changes in humans, and if it were significantly contagious, people would pretty quickly recognize the signs, once they saw what was happening.  Depending on how possible it was to cure, I think humans might well do more than just ostracize someone, at least if the disease was severely virulent, contagious, and madness-inducing.  They might just kill people who had the fungus and burn their bodies under high heat, or some similar process that prevents reproduction of the next round of spores.

The most successful pathogens among humans are ones that are not too dangerous (most of the time), not too obvious, and not too debilitating.  With the advent of any new pathogen, such as a new virus, the most rapidly or certainly lethal strains usually die out, or are selected out, relatively quickly, because if you’re a virus (for instance), you “want” your host to spread you before it dies, ideally for as long as possible, and they can’t tend to do that if they’re very sick or dead.

With a new disease, the tendency is for the most susceptible people and the most lethal pathogens to be selected out‒by each other, really‒early in the timeline of the spread.  That may be part of why the so-called Spanish Flu was so lethal in the early 20th century, killing tens of millions of people…and then became less dreadful over time, so now it’s just one of the strains of influenza that kills only (!) tens of thousands of people a year (in the US).

Maybe there’s a CNS pathogen that makes people get weirder over time and want to go south into subtropical, swampy, sunny and humid habitats, because‒I don’t know‒that’s where it needs to complete its lifecycle (or Peloton or whatever it uses for exercise, ha ha).  As Spock said, it would explain a great many things.

There’s so much I could go into about misunderstandings and misleading oversimplifications about pathogens and epidemiology to which even otherwise quite intelligent people fall prey (and then, alas, spread to others).  I could also discuss how various “ideologies” spread within and between human minds very much like mental viruses‒not exactly like, for instance, chronic hepatitides and HIV and HTLV and so on, but not all that different, either‒but there’s so much that could be said and, like the backrooms, I could just go on and on and on…

Even just sticking with more ordinarily biological pathogens, there’s so much misunderstanding out there; I have sympathy for some of it, but not for a lot of it.  But this is already a longish post.

I guess I will close with a minor public service statement:  Yersinia pestis‒the coccobacillus that causes “plague”, and about which there was some talk in the news after a woman in Russia in a plague research facility apparently died of an “unspecified pneumonia”‒has never been gone.  It’s not like smallpox.  It’s in the environment, it occasionally still infects people, and even more occasionally kills people‒probably fewer worldwide annually than the average flu deaths in the US, so, far from zero, but not exactly a major global public health crisis.

But plague, being a bacterial illness, is quite treatable by antibiotics!  And because it’s not everywhere all over the shop all the time, it doesn’t seem to be as prone to develop antibiotic resistance as quickly as the more common pathogens tend to do.

Certainly, if you start to develop bubos, you should get to the doctor/hospital, but it is not a death sentence.  You should pay more attention to newer viruses than to bacteria and fungi that have been around for a long time, and pay attention to older viruses (e.g., measles) that had been controlled by vaccines but for which that control is attenuating because people who don’t know their subject nevertheless feel free to pontificate about it and even to give advice to others.

You should probably stay away from Florida.

*This is an exaggeration to make a (slightly humorous?) point.