Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.

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justonceokay 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Parasites are my main go-to when I meet someone complaining about the modern world. In the history of multicellular organisms on earth, only (some) humans—and only in the last ~100 years—have had the luxury of not being completely infested with parasites.

Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.

	▲	Cthulhu_ 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This was / is likely a factor in the "kernel of truth" with the whole "deworming tablets cure covid-19" thing, the chances of survival of people in certain areas infected with the virus increased if they were administered deworming medication because they also had a parasitic infection.

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davidkuennen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And just like that we just learned that parasites may have been good for us [1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8162934/

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sehansen 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The fact that low-grade parasite-infections dampen autoimmune diseases isn't that big of a win. Presumably our immune system is as aggressive as it is in part due to the parasite-load our ancestors were exposed to.

	▲	gobdovan 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We solved the parasite problem and at the same time changed the ecology we were accustomed to. The irony of dynamic systems.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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