Baffling neurological illness affects growing number of young adults

"Such blooms are a regular feature of Australian inland waterways and are increasing due to nutrient run-off, reduced river flows and climate change."

So while climate change (i.e., warming in targeted areas) doesn't help, it's more of the final nail in a series of nails we've been driving into Mother Nature's heart.

The idea we could be so negligent and abusive of our own home without repercussions is a great narrative for profits, but not so good for our home.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6651/10/2/83/htm

Seems to accumulate in bivalves and crustaceans but not fish.

Not sure why you're assuming this has anything to do with climate change. What could be the link there?

Until relatively recently they were considered some kind of ‘wake up sweating and dismiss the nightmare as just fantasy’ type cause that should be dismissed by rational people, though there were a number of serious known diseases that no virus or bacteria could be shown identified as causing.

Not actually knowing what causes a disease is a lot more common than people think though, including for a number of relatively common diseases.

The ones we’ve shown a prior cause for had a big question mark next to them despite concerted effort. They were also generally in either remote populations that were practicing some taboo things (human cannibalism), a few families, or in animals (scrapie), and clearly fatal.

In the mid 60’s it was becoming apparent these diseases were not likely caused by the most common theory of a ‘slow virus’ or any known bacteria, as even biological sterilizing agents, viral killing agents, hard UV, and high levels of ionizing radiation didn’t stop samples from being infectious, and searches to find the actual cause started looking for more novel sources, despite a lot of skepticism.

The term prion, after decades of research, was only coined in ‘82, and only generally accepted as the actual source of the disease (instead of a red herring for a disease caused by a not-yet-isolate virus) in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. One of the most prolific researchers on the topic got a Nobel prize for his work proving they exist - but only in 2017.

A brief history [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4626585/]

So not likely, but until another cause can be isolated, best to not fully rule it out either, even if it is negative for all known prions.

With how good many of our tests actually are, it’s easy to overweight their accuracy in categorizing unknown phenomenon. Somewhat of a CSI type effect.

New contagious prions? Bacteria that generate prions? Viruses that code for prions?

Environmental pollution is everywhere industrial capitalism is. All the major scandals about waste disposal in Europe (including nuclear waste disposal!) should make us think twice before we as a society find it acceptable to allow anyone to produce that kind of dangerous substances.

Doctors working for everyone also means they work for the highest bidder. Remember the tabaco industry in the US and the doctors literally advertising it?

How about doctors near areas of chemical spills getting $£€¥ from the companies to keep quiet about them?

How about the opioid crisis that has killed thousands of Americans?

Yeah. So, if you want to bring up a misleading example, at least think of the entire cycle of the "other side" of this.

At the end of the day the thing is "interesting what happens when doctors are incentivized with capital and success is measured by how rich you are"

Our health outcomes have plateaued, wait times increased and costs rocketed.

The inevitable nature of uncompetitive systems.

I don't think that's the reason. Public health systems in Canada/France/Belgium have (had?) a very good reputation because they were in fact really good until the neoliberal turn on the 80s/90s. When you have health workers running the show with a fair budget, wait times are low and results are good, and everyone is happy. Now introduce some managerial feudalism (see David Greaber's talk at CCC last year) and micro-management/benchmarking and things start to degrade.

Add to this mix that big corporations don't pay their dues and the government keeps reducing budgets and pretending they don't know why there's no more money flowing in and suddenly you've got health crisis on a wide scale and most people you know working in hospitals are depressive, either quitting or on the verge of suicide due to contradicting objectives: they want to help people but they're not given the means to do so. Social dues fraud is dozens of billions of euros every year in France, it's well-known and well-flagged and no government wants to do something about it.

If you're working in IT, think about it this way: management is benchmarking how many functions you write per day and does not care about the state of things as a whole. You are incentivized not to produce tests (which would indicate failure from your team specifically) but rather to ship away at once. Are you gonna produce good code?

EDIT: I should make it clear when i talk about social dues fraud, i don't mean individuals gaming the system to gain funds they're not owed (which is < 1% of fraud), and i'm not talking about small companies not paying their dues (the State is really good at harassing those until money flows in), i'm talking about CAC40 corporations who make billions of profit every year. They are the ones responsible for the social security hole ("trou de la sécu") and that's public knowledge.

This case clearly has basically nothing to do with public 'health care' this is clearly political and health research related.