hot take comments like "I hope I get cyclosporiasis I want to lose 10 lbs" are not only obvious fatphobia but also part of mass illness normalization that has been an ongoing effort since 2020 to minimize the dangers of disease and infections
They want to act like high levels of sickness whether it be airborne or foodborne are normal and not the responsibility of agencies like public health or food safety regulation so they can get away with dismantling them.
"No one's going to die," they say. Factually incorrect and honestly we don't have good data on what a society that's normalized explosive diarrhea looks like, but y'all have an idea what the cholera era looked like, right?
Mass disease is not normal and preventable. One of the number one causes is how large agricultural companies refuse to treat their employees like humans: people picking the food you eat don't have bathrooms, so when they get sick, they're left with a choice to shit their pants and get back to work or squat in the field and get back to work. I know which I'd choose in their shoes...
Mass illness isn't just a public health issue, it's a workers' rights issue and more!
Vol. 1 Chapter 15 of Kapital:
Machine and Modern Industry
Excerpt from Section 9: The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same. Their General Extension in the Workplace.
“What could possibly show better the character of the capitalist mode of production, than the necessity that exists for forcing upon it, by Acts of Parliament, the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health? In the potteries the Factory Act of 1864 “has whitewashed and cleansed upwards of 200 workshops, after a period of abstinence from any such cleaning, in many cases of 20 years, and in some, entirely,” (this is the “abstinence” of the capitalist!) “in which were employed 27,800 artisans, hitherto breathing through protracted days and often nights of labour, a mephitic atmosphere, and which rendered an otherwise comparatively innocuous occupation, pregnant with disease and death. The Act has improved the ventilation very much.” [214]
At the same time, this portion of the Act strikingly shows that the capitalist mode of production, owing to its very nature, excludes all rational improvement beyond a certain point. It has been stated over and over again that the English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the work is continuous, 500 cubic feet is the very least space that should be allowed for each person. Now, if the Factory Acts, owing to their compulsory provisions, indirectly hasten on the conversion of small workshops into factories, thus indirectly attacking the proprietary rights of the smaller capitalists, and assuring a monopoly to the great ones, so, if it were made obligatory to provide the proper space for each workman in every workshop, thousands of small employers would, at one full swoop, be expropriated directly!
The very root of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the self-expansion of all capital, large or small, by means of the “free” purchase and consumption of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought to a deadlock before these 500 cubic feet of breathing space. The sanitary officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity for those 500 cubic feet, and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus, in fact, declare that consumption and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary conditions to the existence of capital. [215]
