I read a news story about a guy who died from rabies after receiving a kidney transplant. Although nobody was aware when he died, the donor of the kidney had contracted rabies after being scratched by a skunk several weeks before he died and his organs were harvested.

I got curious about how the donor got scratched by the skunk, but instead only found this article from August, which informed me that the U.S. has a rabies outbreak, and has more deaths from rabies in the last year than several previous years…

Not sure if people were already talking about this outbreak, and I just missed it? It’s been a bit of a weird year, and there’s been a lot of crazy shit to keep up with.

Anyway, this is also how I ended up reading the sentence informing me some people are worried dogs are getting autism from vaccines.

Outbreaks of rabies seem to be rising across the U.S., CDC surveillance shows

  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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    13 hours ago

    Can we call it now? The usa is not a real nation that should be taken seriously.

      • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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        10 hours ago

        I guess this is one more reason to never travel to the states, I worry Canada and Mexico will see more rabid animals though.

        And now I think I will get a rabies booster (I hope that is still a thing).

  • Yggstyle@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    The brainworm won. And while Im not a fan of eugenics… I think america needs to do the rest of the world a solid and sterilize that 37% to protect the human race.

    • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      I had a hairdresser once that told me about her young daughter getting scratched by a raccoon. I asked if she took her to get the shots and she said “no, she’s fine”. We’re all doomed.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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      20 hours ago

      We humans are victims of our own success. Vaccines work so good at eradicating diseases that people haven’t been exposed to the horrors that we used to. My family has a story about someone loosely related who contracted rabies and was chained to a tree until they died a few weeks later. This was no more than a generation before me!

      People really aren’t scared enough of diseases.

      • ngdev@lemmy.zip
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        20 hours ago

        im calling bullshit on whoever told you that. im pretty sure ive heard that same story. also, rabies causes fear of water so theyd likely die of dehydration way sooner

        • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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          18 hours ago

          Checking back in.

          Rabies sufferers die from encephalopathic hemorrhaging way before dehydration. So I guess I’m not remembering the timeline accurately.

        • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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          19 hours ago

          Eh, maybe. But it served its purpose and scared the shit out of me. I’m curious if rabies sufferers will dehydrate themselves to the point of death. Another wiki hole, here I come!

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      People are far more scared of inconvenience than death.

      Most people would rather put their pet down than have to care for them in some new way that requires money and attention, and this is what people who don’t understand autism think it is, like they will have to strap their dogs into a special chair and spoon-feed them.

      Same with people. Most ignorant anti-vaxxers are far more terrified of being locked into caring for a disabled child than having a child die from a “natural” disease. And while they don’t consciously think this way, some layer of their brain has indeed weighed this out and formed their opinions.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        11 hours ago

        I do genuinely wonder if some amount of vaccine skepticism comes from a place of just not wanting to get a shot.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Rabies is in my top three fears, maybe even number one. Just an absolutely awful way to go, scared, in pain, can’t drink water. I love water.

      • Soggy@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Good thing it’s extremely preventable thanks to modern medicine. We should all be so lucky that our greatest fear is 100% avoidable through easy life choices.

    • altphoto@lemmy.today
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      19 hours ago

      He used to scratch with the left foot but after the vaccine he does it with the right foot!

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Fun fact: Rabies is pretty much the most-lethal disease ever. A diagnosis is an absolute death sentence, followed by an agonizing death.

    • alternategait@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Just because I’ve had so many people tell me “I didn’t need so many meds/a walker/ oxygen up my nose until I came to the hospital”, I want to point out that the diagnosis itself is not the death sentence. As the organ donor showed, even if no one knows you have rabies, rabies will kill you dead.

  • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    Solve it with enforcement. If they have to come out over a dog issue and the fucking thing don’t have a rabies vaccination, it gets put down. No exceptions. The dog doesn’t have any religious affiliation so that argument won’t work either.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      11 hours ago

      That’s generally how it works if your dog or cat (or squirrel) bites someone. Unless you can provide proof of a current vaccination, the animal has to get tested for rabies. This involves getting a sample of brain tissue. For pet owners that seems excessive, but for someone who has seen a rabies infection first-hand, there is no animal valuable enough to skip that test

  • Scrambled Eggs @lazysoci.al
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    21 hours ago

    Because of vaccinations, my dog has a pretty low IQ. She can’t even do simple arithmetic, she’s non verbal, and cannot maintain eye contact. So sad.

  • Zink@programming.dev
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    16 hours ago

    This is so stupid that it makes me think maybe the “great filter” (the reason we don’t see space-faring civilizations everywhere) is actually that life forms who evolved by fighting for survival and going through natural selection cannot psychologically handle a post-scarcity society. It’s like when the threats disappear everybody forgets they exist even if they are well documented historically.

    Related: if you don’t know about how horrifying a disease is, go search for some articles and copypasta about it. Congrats on being one of today’s (un)lucky 10,000!

  • False@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    Have these people ever interacted with dogs? I’m pretty sure autism is their baseline.

    • alternategait@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      I’m pretty sure autism is their baseline.

      Unless it’s a Border Collie, and in that case it’s (probably pretty literal) OCD.

  • TomMasz@piefed.social
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    21 hours ago

    Why stop at having your children die of preventable diseases when you can also have your pets die from preventable diseases?

  • Humana@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    My dog is afraid of trains which is occasionally inconvenient for traveling somewhere far as we live car free.

    If I had just paired his vaccines with Tylenol he would have instead been able to identify the year and model of every locamotive 🚂 and seek them out like he does now with french fries. 🍟

    • guy@piefed.social
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      13 hours ago

      The issue is that he can identify the year and model of every locomotive because of the vaccine induced autism, and this terrifies him because he is a dog and shouldn’t be able to.