NelC, Bad Actuator

Frequently wrong (but not about not being NorthEast Lincs Council @NELCouncil). Nor Near Eastern Languages & Civilization at University of Washington @NELCUW.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@wartranslated https://t.co/xpnZDLICkc

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@WarDamnGoose @wartranslated Gosh, and the Russians have been such steadfast truth-tellers all the way through.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Wow, she explained it well

[ダレルタイター @DaTa_jp]

男の子ってこう言うのが好きなんでしょ

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@KentAtwater7 @lordehelpusall @onlyasianbabes Huh, I wish I could remember what that was about.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@elonmusknews30 A. Yes

X is a dumb name, it was always a dumb name. X is not cool, just like its present owner has never been cool.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@curiosityonx Elon Gate.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@MAGAUSNVet @DOGEQEEN She's not trans, you plank.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@BGatesIsaPyscho I can't tell what you think is the problem here. Are you just posting random pictures and expecting others to find so-called anomalies for you?

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@Xeer What are you if you see Godzilla?

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@Ubiquitous_Romp @Srvivlinstincts @Khaledhzakariah The article cites 2600 cases of honour-based abuse in 2022. In 2022–23 there were over a _million_ cases of violence against women in the UK as a whole.

"Honour" is just a rationalisation for abuse, and is pretty insignificant compared to the other rationalisations.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@Ubiquitous_Romp @Srvivlinstincts @Khaledhzakariah FGM is not ubiquitous within Islam. The majority is practiced in northern Africa, by Christian communities there as well as Muslim and African traditional communities.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@sedderaside Also Lily Savage might be worth looking into. And Danny La Rue.

Also also, the whole genre of British pantomime.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@sedderaside Not sure if it's quite hat you want, but Monty Python had more than a few sketches with the guys playing women. Or caricatures of women.

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@XaviGelledHair @sedderaside Dude, no-one freaking asked for your unqualified medical opinion on trans folk. Nobody mentioned the subject until you did.

Have you considered that you might have an emotional condition of some kind?

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@RemoteOwls2047 @nickbogannam @SpaceX @spacexjackie Short of putting Trump, Kennedy, Miller, Musk, et al on a Starship and sending them out into space, I don't think engineering has much to say about _that_ issue.

Engineers got to do engineering; it's a bit much to expect them to do sociology, politics, diplomacy, etc. instead.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

View of Starship landing burn and splashdown on Flight 10, made possible by SpaceX’s recovery team. Starship made it through reentry with intentionally missing tiles, completed maneuvers to intentionally stress its flaps, had visible damage to its aft skirt and flaps, and still executed a flip and landing burn that placed it approximately 3 meters from its targeted splashdown point

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@esjesjesj Well, no more wrong than when the girls do the same choreography, objectively.

It is _unusual_ to see a man performing feminine-coded dance moves in this society, though. To some, being unusual is definitively _wrong_, but I'm not one of those. (Not often.)

[NelC, Bad Actuator @NelC]

@hungsolo @DaveBlass I just can't read the word without picturing David Schwimmer as Captain Sobel deploying it on Lt. Winters when he was setting him up for a disciplining.