Rabies is an incredibly lethal virus that kills more than 50,000 people globally each year. About 99% of those people who die from rabies were infected by the bite of a dog. This doesn’t mean that dogs are evil, or that they are disgusting, or that they should be eradicated from the planet to prevent the risk of disease transmission to humans. It does mean that we should do everything in our power to promote vaccination efforts, study disease transmission on a local and global scale, and find ways to prevent infected dogs from encountering and biting humans.
Okay, now are you ready to hear my biggest personal biology hot take?
This is pretty much how I feel about ticks carrying Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacteria that causes Lyme disease) and other arthropod disease vectors. Yes, these animals cause unbelievable suffering to humans by inadvertently transmitting disease, but that doesn’t mean they should be portrayed as evil or exterminated entirely from the environment. Ecologists have been speaking for years on how critical these species are within their established trophic webs, and how their removal could have devastating effects to many other organisms including humans. You can still be scared of or grossed out by these animals (very normal response to a potentially dangerous disease vector), but it’s important to understand that the best way for scientists to minimize the risk of these animals is NOT just eliminating them from the environment. No animal is evil or immoral for the ecological niche it fills, and encouraging a more nuanced understanding of these animals can arm us with better ways to minimize their negative impact to humans.
@crearuru this is a really funny comment, I find it interesting sometimes to see how others interpret the things I say on this website that seem very straightforward in my mind. Always neat to hear a different perspective.
To me, the phrase “promote vaccination efforts” would imply supporting development and distribution of vaccines to protect humans against these vector borne illnesses. In the case of rabies we can easily vaccinate the primary vector to threaten humans (dogs), but with arboviruses or bacteria carried by invertebrates it is obviously more feasible to directly vaccinate the humans at risk.
In this post I am advocating for continued research and development of vaccines to protect us against vector borne illnesses, I am NOT proposing an army of tick veterinarians tromping into the woods with teeny needles to vaccinate our least favorite arachnids for a transmissible bacterial disease, as hilarious and adorable as that mental image may be. I love your whimsical mind!
Ending-up a tick eradication advocate because after spending three days vaccinating one small wooded lot's worth of ticks by hand with really tiny syringes you're ready to asphalt the entire surface of the earth and be done with it.
