Wild monkeys with killer herpes are breeding like crazy in Florida
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Is there a state or federal agency that's ever determined an animal to be a threat to people in an area to the degree that they then tried to wipe it out? Does it matter that the monkeys got put here because some company thought tourists would like them?
In Florida alone that has happened with pythons in the everglades and lionfish in Florida oceans (at least south Florida).
Edit: and African snails. And in a roundabout way mosquitos, but of the lot are not invasive to Florida.
Unfortunately, infected monkeys aren't really useful for anything.
Why keep around an invasive species that carries a deadly virus?
So to answer your question: more than you might think.
Haha yeah they moved to Florida, didn't they?
People breed alligators in their bathtubs, release giant pythons. Maybe they don’t need to breed the moneys but do things to support their population growth (kill predators if any, leave food, etc...) or they can breed monkey without the disease. The invasive monkeys did get here and released in the first place after all.
Place a nominal bounty on the monkeys of, say, $50 each and threaten anyone attempting to breed and release the animals for profit with a lifetime jail sentence and the Cobra Effect would not arise.
I’d say it sounds like you read about the anecdote and have little first hand experience with these bounty programs in Florida. Whereas I live in south Florida and I am familiar with fraud and failure of these bounty programs with pythons and lion fish...whereas I have seen non-bounty government programs gain ground in the eradication of giant African snails.
Good luck gaining any ground with advocating for life time jail sentences for breeding animals (invasive or otherwise) in Florida. Have any evidence such a program has ever existed?
It was an argumentum ad absurdum to demonstrate that with sufficient disincentives to cheating, the "Cobra Effect" might be effectively countered - in reply to your questionable claim that any and all bounty program "is known" to not work, as if that's some sort of law of physics.
I'm not familiar with the failed python and fish programs you mention, but I'll take your word for it that they were implemented so incompetently and supervised so inadequately that fraudulent breeding for profit took place. That said, I'd believe almost anything about Southern Florida and perhaps you're right that it's not the ideal place for a government program requiring tight control and a deft touch.
Having read the article - there's only 200 monkeys and they're all pretty localized to one place - I don't see the problem with the government simply doing it themselves, so I agree somewhat, but still take issue with your generalizations. Bounty programs are known to be unworkable, in South Florida, with snakes and fish. That's it. Oh, and in possibly-apocryphal British India.
I doubt you need to even give a bounty though, just open them for hunting. Better yet give out a commemorative plaque.
Obviously your make believe hypothetical implementation of a bounty program backed by breeding and release crimes punishable by life imprionsment, render my statement false because I said “known to”, whereas bounty programs in fact are not “known to” increase invasive species and result in failure - despite the only three real world examples used (two of which were in the same state). You are right it is not a law of physics, thus rendering any point moot based on your hypothetical, whereas $50 bounty programs per animal backed by life inprisonment crimes are “known to” succeed when the animal is in central Florida and is a monkey.
Plus who wants to be the "murder the tiny adorable monkeys" politician haha
They’re not invasive, and not a single person in history has died from being bitten by a wild monkey with herpes b despite thousands of people being bitten per year.
Perhaps it's something for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to consider? They seem to be the one in charge of Burmese Python control in the Everglades.
The helicase-primase inhibitor Pritelivir is more effective than Acyclovir and related nucleoside analogues. It is also understood that the efficacy of both drugs accumulates.
A few labs are working on CRISPR therapeutics for HSV, most notably Keith Jerome's work at Fred Hutch.
Another company, Phylogica, are taking a different approach. I'm not exactly sure of the mechanism.
https://phylogica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/181206_In-v...
n.b. If anyone here suffers from HSV (statistically, many of you do), consider ordering Pritelivir from Japan. It is marketed under the brand Amenalief, and it's for a different strain of HSV so you would be taking it off-label. Usual disclaimers apply; I'm neither a doctor, nor a lawyer, nor responsible for what you do.
It's not life altering in any way besides the fact that HSV2 has such a strong stigma in the US and tends to turn away a non insignificant number of romantic partners. From a health perspective, I had a rash once in my life and basically entirely forgot about even having it (outside of taking 800mg of Acyclovir every day), but from a social perspective, it adds a 50-70% chance that someone will turn you down. Dating is non-trivial already, adding another 2/3 dropoff to your dating life is no joke. On the plus side, it was nice to see a show like Adam Ruins Everything cover the issue to try to dispel some of the stigma, but I suspect that it will not be addressed within my lifetime.
Additionally, in the state of California it's a well known way to shake down people of wealth. I always disclose my status before getting intimate, as required by law, but I also need to make sure that I have your consent somewhere in writing. Otherwise later you can claim that you were never told, you got the virus, and it's my fault, and now you're entitled to restitutions for the stress and damages to your lifestyle. It becomes a he said vs she said and practically a coin toss that decides if you are to part ways with anything between $100k to a few million. You always think "Is this person going to be the one who decides to use me to make a buck?". My legal counsel always advises that a new partner send me an email consenting to the risks she would be exposing herself to by engaging in intercourse.
If that's not romance at its finest, I don't know what is.
I've had elderly relatives down with shingles, caused by the herpes virus, for months. Their shingles being a very latent reappearance of Chickenpox acquired in childhood. These viruses are opportunistic, and you will grow weaker in time, if you don't die first.
The stigma, in this case, is appropriate in my opinion.
It surprises me how cavalier everyone has been about HPV and Chickenpox throughout my lifetime. At least we've finally appreciated how HPV causes most cervical cancers and have developed routine immunization there. We badly need to develop Herpes vaccines. I'm confident once we have them, it will conveniently become "discovered" that HSV has been quietly responsible for some prolific form of suffering like Alzheimers and/or Parkinsons all this time.
> By the time they're teenagers or young adults, about 50% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies in their blood. By the time they are over age 50, some 80-90% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies.
And this is HSV1 alone. You add HSV2 to it and, I believe according to some stats, you end up with 80% of the world population having some variation of it. Stigmatizing 4 out of 5 people in the world makes no sense and is helping nobody. You can't avoid getting it, unless you never interact with another human being, and treating others like broken goods until you become one too (because it IS only a matter of time) is inhumane.
On a related note, I believe the majority of the stigma comes from HSV2, which I'm sure has much more to do with sexual morality than with medicine. Nobody blinks an eye if you have its oral counterpart, you go to CVS and buy a Blistex. However, if you have the genital version, now THAT is a problem. Same virus, vastly different reaction.
> It's not life altering in any way besides the fact that HSV2 has such a strong stigma <snip>...
It is potentially quite life-altering, and you may agree with me after you're over 60 years old. If you instead asserted "it hasn't been life-altering in any way so far besides..." then I wouldn't have replied at all.
Adding a persistent genital herpes outbreak to six months of shingles in old age qualifies as life-altering in my book.
Your comment comes across as if everyone should get over it and not exclude partners infected with genital herpes from their intimate lives, that this stigma exists just because it's associated with sex.
Nobody wants to be infected with any form of the herpes virus, the variants of which will cumulatively add life-altering complications when your immune system deteriorates. Genital herpes is appropriately highly stigmatized because it has the most potential for effective prevention through avoidance.
Choice of sexual partner is already culturally accepted as a highly discrimatory exercise, it basically goes unnoticed for the uninfected population to exclude those infected with genital herpes from their sex lives, it's not like the uninfected end up without sufficient available partners as a result. It has zero impact on their daily goings on. Compare that to the futility of stigmatizing Chickenpox however, the difference seems obvious.
For a not-insignificant minority, HSV is life-altering. Both for the reasons you've mentioned, and also for increased instance of suicide, and increased risk of infant mortality if the mother is experiencing an outbreak during birth.
Not sure if you were making reference to a specific belief, but there's already some evidence that HSV1 may be part of the Alzheimer's cause puzzle [1].
WRT Herpes Simplex recurrence in particular: "Causes of recurrence may include: decreased immune function, stress, and sunlight exposure." [1]
This isn't unique to Herpes, if you have HPV it's going to be an increasing nuisance with age. A major component of what makes growing old awful is everything your immune system kept in check slowly consumes you.
The guy who introduced them to the area put them on an island in the middle of Silver River, and they swam away the first day.
Check out wiki, which has links to some papers.
[1] In a new study, researchers found that the voracious appetite of the Burmese python can outpace even the reproductive speed of the marsh rabbit, a small brown bunny that seems to have disappeared from the Everglades National Park. -- https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-invasiv...
- "... a type of herpes lethal to humans."
- "But in humans, McHV-1 can cause a flu-like illness that can progress..."
I'm not clear -- is this always lethal (as I understand the first sentence to be) or is there some survival rate (as I understand the second sentence to be). I haven't yet found any clarification on McHV-1 online yet -- anyone know?
[edit: formatting]
For context, the current Ebola Zaire outbreak in northeast DRC has about 60% mortality.