this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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Viruses mutate with almost every division. Hell, almost every strand of DNA that divides has mutations. It's a natural phenomenon and not exclusively caused by one particular thing or situation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation
You seem to be mixing up a few key aspects of how and why new strains are formed, and somehow, you are overestimating the transmissibility of a virus between different animals.
It's like you understand some of the key concepts of this stuff, but animal domestication somehow got mixed in as a root cause for natural processes.
So you do not increase the chance of mutation onto other creatures by having animals and humans living close together? What is your point? You're not saying anything different to what I'm saying. Viruses mutate, can jump from creature to creature. But when there are a lot of creatures living close together, it increases the chances. When there are a lot of different kind of creatures, there is a bigger chance of the virus mutating onto other type of creatures. Whether it's lifestock, rats, insects, domesticated animals, whatever. When we talk about animal to human transmission, it's called zoonosis.
Scientists (microbiologists for example) warn for this all the time, especially since covid. Here in the Netherlands there are a lot of animals living very close to humans, with all the giant farms so close cities, increasing the mutation chance a lot. During covid nerts farms were closed because of this in several countries including Denmark and the Netherlands. They banned animal markets in China because of this. Because densely packed animals and many different kinds of animals increase the chance of mutation, and when close to humans, the chance of zoonosis increases drastically.
So what am I mixing up here?
Here are some scientific articles:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.2736
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6787790/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240325114138.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14830
You kinda keep jumping around regarding what your point is. First it was that caged animals caused all pandemics, and over time it has shifted to Europeans living close to animals caused all pandemics, and finally animals living close to humans caused all pandemics.
Yes, close contact between animals will increase chances of mutations - but what are we supposed to do? If your point is "industrial farming is bad and increases chances of pandemics", most people here would likely agree. But somehow you seem to be arguing that the black death was caused by people keeping rats and fleas in cages? Mixing your messages like this doesn't help your point come across.
Yeah, I noticed that they were bouncing around quite a bit and stating some facts, but also drawing some wild conclusions from those facts. (It's a lost cause trying to separate those two trains of thought, me thinks.)
Thank you for changing what I said to something different you can attack me on. If only people would take me serious on my fight against fleas in captivity.
I'm only trying to explain to you why you're getting the responses you're getting. Ignore me if you prefer that.
Get off the Ritalin, it's not helping.
It's not an attack. You simply don't stick with any point long enough to have a proper discussion.