The three scariest afflictions to me are: Cancer, Rabies, and Prions
But of all those listed, cancer is far and away the most common and thus most likely to kill you in practice.
Not a biologist, but if I got that correctly, every time your body replicates your DNA a bit of the end is cut of. There is a section of "garbage" at the end, but once that is gone the "functional" parts of the DNA are cut of.
Once that happens you are guaranteed to develop tumors sooner or later.
It prevents cells from multiplying uncontrollably (and accumulating mutations in the process) by shortening the fuse at each generation.
There's a hierarchy with stem cells at the top that live long, rarely divide, and have few mutations, and the children of the children ... of their children at the bottom divide often, but have a short fuse and a limited lifetime, so they don't keep accumulating mutations as much
https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/deadly-brain-amoeba-infec...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/21/brain-ea...
On the first wipeout, my face smashed into the water, and it went very far up my nose.
On getting up, I remembered "Naegleria fowleri", and wondered, hmmmm this might have killed me.
Luckily no symptoms appeared over the next few days.
I feel like wakeboarding should be banned in warm freshwaters.
> The risk of Naegleria fowleri infection is very low. There were 29 reported infections in the United States in the 10 years from 2013 to 2022, despite millions of recreational water exposures each year. By comparison, in the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, there were an estimated 4,012 unintentional drowning deaths each year in the United States.
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/general.html
You’re 150x more likely to drown. And even that is exceedingly unlikely - like 0.05% or something per year.
It's only a matter of time before nature invents a virus that will work around our defenses and spread silently and then wham, 90% of humanity is gone.
I think we’d manage. Already HIV and AIDS are highly treatable, and lifespans are measured in years and decades rather than days and weeks.
Doesn't it cost something like $100k/yr? And if so do insurance companies keep people on their policy for long after they contract it?
In a lot of countries, access to healthcare is not dependent on the wealth of the recipient, or the goodwill of an insurance company.
With the right motivation, a lot could be accomplished in that time.
AIDS started being noticed in 1981 when a lot of gay men started falling ill and dying. It took until 1983 before scientists figured out it was a virus causing it. By the early 1990s, HIV was the No. 1 cause of death among Americans ages 25 to 44. There weren't any real mitigations until around 1995. So be glad that it wasn't airborne, because there simply wouldn't have been any scientists left to work out how to keep people alive, because an airborne AIDS would have infected literally everyone and killed off almost all before we'd have time to work out how to prevent it from killing people.
8-10 years is an average. Some people would start dying earlier, setting the alarm bells ringing, but you have a point that 1981 doesn’t represent the point where the clock starts ticking for global survival. Airborne transmission doesn’t guarantee 100% infection rates, and so there’s likely some extra time built in there as the virus spreads. For sure it would be a crisis much worse than COVID, but I dont think the picture would be as bleak for the species as you paint it.
Edit: I was wrong about rabies.
Oh my this is very very very false. People are rarely vaccinated for rabies. Only high risk people such as veterinarians are vaccinated. People who are bitten can be given PEP, but the vast majority of people are completely unprotected against rabies.
If you live in the US there absolutely are many areas that have rabies infected wildlife.
Rabies is 10000x worse to get than HIV.
I'd rather be infected with rabies, and receive a vaccine/cure immediately, than be infected with HIV, which I'd need to deal with chronically for the rest of my life.