Toxoplasma – The Most Successful Parasite in the world (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Toxoplasma – The Most Successful Parasite in the world (2018)

bohembaeksvensson.medium.com

13 pointswalterbell6 comments

sigh

This guy is one of those lowkey nuts on the Internet — just lowkey, but, still a nut. Oh, sure, it's quite possible he's right that the world should pay it more attention as a public health matter, but bringing Jungian archetypes into the matter is a sign we've left science behind for woowoo feelings. The accompanying argument trying to justify this saying 'it affects the nervous system and evolved with it' is technically true — but without a meaningful mechanism of influence remains just an excuse to be sloppy with his reasoning.

And to be clear, there is no mechanism. Our author writes: "Parasitism is an expert in stealth and distortion. To avoid discovery." A cell-sized organism that evolved over 10,000 years or whatever didn't do so with the specific goal of affecting how people reason about topics in twenty-first century medicine, which could threaten it with exposure. That's a pretty good SCP Foundation antimeme story, sir, but is quite implausible for a protozoan.

But at least you can cure it with DMT ;P

Hey, that means we can just sleep it off.

Honestly, this article evokes the eerie sense that Toxoplasma is indeed a huge public health issue, but it is being spun in with wild conspiracy theories so nothing gets done about it.

It's actually plausible from the view of natural selection. When you eradicate diseases which are fatal, or where it's easy to explain the mechanism of symptoms and block it... then parasitic "experts in stealth and distortion" can take over.

In other words, modern medical science creates evolutionary pressure toward parasites/infections that have raft of unconnected mild symptoms with complicated underlying biology, which are impossible to replicate in vitro and make a career out of studying it. Or there are cultural taboos involved, for example Chlamydia might be similar silent killer but it's dismissed as trivial venereal disease and that isn't very respectful area of study. (compare https://www.cdc.gov/pneumonia/atypical/cpneumoniae/about/his... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069... )

The overall result is, only crackpots consider such a possibility seriously :(

Toxoplasma is an interesting subject but this reads like a cross between a link roundup and someone's paranoid and somewhat delusional un-edited notes. Some sections are 20% bolded. Some parts read like this:

> [bolded, note capitalization] The first thing you should do is to See It, Get to Know It. Become Aware.

> Be conscious of its existence and get to know the facts. Stay curious and inquisitive. Do not feed it with fear or frenzied emotional displays. Calm and discipline your emotions. Use your intelligence and ability to contemplation, inquiry, and discernment. Embrace your universal right to a consciousness that is yours. Your free will is beyond anything else and no one/nothing but You are in control. It is a choice.

> [block quote] Tg is the best news since it was discovered that bacteria are the culprit in many infections. If we solve the Tg problem we can reduce the disease burden. It can only get better from here.

It gets less intelligible as you get to the end. If this wasn't written in 2018 I'd assume it was GPT-3 output.

"I’m not a scientist — so this is a layman’s perspective. Please do your own research and do not take my words face value. I discovered Toxoplasma because my son has bipolar disorder and my daughter has diabetes Type 1. It was my research in these serious conditions that introduced me to the subject."

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