To a person that gets bitten by a stray dog, the information that Taiwan is most likely no longer “rabies free” (after infected animals have been confirmed) might be an important piece of information to get proper treatment. (Personally, should that happen to me, I would insist on getting a rabies shot - I wouldn’t trust any doctor telling me “oh, but Taiwan is 100% rabies free” after reading that article).
Would you think it’s better that the government enforces a “news blackout” on those kind of topics to avoid a few individuals reacting panicky?
Well yeah. But that article is nothing to do with anything of that nature.
All sorts of crap happens that nobody needs to know about except the officials concerned. I would say this falls very firmly into that category. It’s not a “news blackout” because it isn’t even news. Nothing has happened (if Explant is correct and Taiwan was never in fact “rabies-free”). And I’m frankly disinclined to take the authorities’ claims at face value anyway - hence my previous comment about PCR tests - since they’ve conclusively proved that they have a somewhat dubious understanding of what’s true and what isn’t.
The only possible outcome is that people are likely to panic, particularly given their precarious state of mind right now. It’s not inconceivable that it could - for example - inspire some nutcase to go around killing stray dogs “because there’s a rabies outbreak”, or perhaps for someone to get their pet euthanized because they become convinced that they’ve got rabies. Don’t underestimate human stupidity.
Fair enough. As I’m sure you know, the rabies vaccine is somewhat unique in that you can get it after being bitten by a rabid animal and it will still work (as long as you make haste). But the article doesn’t suggest that there’s any shift in the number of rabid animals wandering around. So there shouldn’t be any public concern.
Worth noting, this isn’t anything new. They ha e found rabies in the past as well. Just extremely rare, only in certain wild animals, and basically in places people don’t frequent.
Why would they want to record such data? Science. Why would someone not want to record such data. I thunk we should record all disease data, it makes an outbreak that much easier to figure out than going in blind.
The obvious risk is wild animal transition to species like dogs which could quite easily transmit it to our own species as people are routinely bit by dogs here.
Edit. I am addressing the rabies issue, not that particular article.
If you’ve ever go down the rabbit hole of of how governments agencies have studied diseases and the testing they’ve done on humans and animals. It gets real dark. As much as we want to point at the Chinese for the Wuhan lab leak, worst things have leaked on accident and possibly to evidently on purpose in other countries.
Start with Plum island in the US. And you’ll see other countries since early 1900s have some crazy shit they’ve done and continue to do.
I am in such labs monthly lol. But I still have no idea the connection you guys are making. It is good to track rabies dispersal as well as various animals distribution. I fail to ee how this is a bad thing. Even moreso, how is being transparent about it a bad thing?
More knowledge is good. If one wants a covid conspiracy connection, this is the polar opposite. With covid, they were hiding data, missing reporting etc etc. This is literally field surveys and testing. Something those in the field biology realm do all the time. And we owe a lot to that work!
Edit. Unless you guys are saying their incompetence has caused false positives. On that note, I can see it happening. Diligence isn’t really a priority in Taiwan. In any facet of life here. So, there is that.
I suppose it might be, although the devil is in the details.
Because (a) people are fecking stupid and can react in unpredictable or counterproductive ways to reports of ‘disease’ and (b) you don’t need to be ‘transparent’ about every little thing that goes on in officialdom.
This is probably a whole thread in itself, but in this particular case there isn’t any ‘knowledge’ being conveyed. We don’t have any information here about “rabies dispersal [and] various animals distribution”. It’s hard to even tell what the point of it is, other than to tell everyone “more vaccines”.
It’s just a possibility. Given the way the COVID “casedemic” panned out (and other historical instances of the same) we don’t really want officials getting obsessed with rabies unless there’s a good reason.
I sgree with @Explant. This rabies issue should be monitored and well publicized. The general public should be aware of the danger of interspecies jumping viruses not as a theory but in this case a very dangerous real thing - yet still low probability in Taiwan.
There are way too many illegal hunters in rural areas. The thousands of maimed dogs, cats and even bears are proof of that. If one of those hunters gets rabies, he may get prompt medical care…if they are smart enough. But what if they take the infected prey home, and it infects their hunting or pet dogs and gets spread from there? People in general should be aware if there is an increase in danger and how to spot a rabid animal if so required, hopefully not.Hence the public service announcements on this matter. It is not fear mongering.
Bats can spread rabies. We have plenty of bats in urban areas of Taiwan. That is more worrying me thinks.
There is no “rabies issue”. This is precisely why they shouldn’t print this sort of thing in newspapers. People read into it all kinds of stuff that isn’t there, and invent their own crises for good measure. Bats, bears, and zoonotic viruses, oh my.
Before you know it, some politician gets it into their head to “mandate” indoor confinement of all pets until further notice with testing every three days to “slow the spread”.
Well, like it or not. Scientists publish science. I am all for it. I do agree with you, people can really be right fucking stupid. Most of us are literally retarded. If not all of us. But if you are suggesting we should suppress information and research out of fear the masses might uprise, that’s some CCP bullshit I can’t get behind.
Your last post, you mentioned newspapers. That makes a bit more sense, in that the media rarely writes details. I am with you there. But my solution seems polar opposite to yours. I say publish more, but publish details as well. Granted, there are space limits, so publish direct links to sources. Again, I am talking about the rabies issue, not the news articles. We ought to eb better educated. Same with all disease. Traffic. Food. Schooling. Drugs. Whatever the thing may be. Be better educated about the reality of it. Raw data, not opinion peices.
If we dumb everything down for the common moron, we get the movie idiocracy. We need to push for better, not enable idiocracy. Sorry, but on this situation I fully disagree. We need to study, track and report. What we don’t need is hyperbolic fluff peices, sure. But we also don’t need an ignorant society, which so far is what we have.
No. I’m suggesting they shouldn’t publish useless information, without context, because the general public will misconstrue it. If they had never published a single word about COVID nobody would have even noticed. In this case, there isn’t even a novel bioweapon floating around.
Well yes. That was sort of my point. Did they explain what this means? Has something actually happened? Are there differences in observed rates or locations? If so, what do we need to know? If not, why are they reporting it?
Yeah, but we’re not. In fact because of the last three years, most people think they know far more about “disease” than they actually do, thanks to a torrent of bullshit that spewed from the newspapers. That’s a really dangerous scenario. People are hypersensitive to things like this, and as per @Icon’s post, they just start making stuff up, chaining together random ideas that they heard about during “the pandemic” without any rhyme or reason.
These aren’t the same thing, not even close. Giving people information does not educate.
I didn’t realise we had a thread that was dedicated entirely to PCR tests and the misuse/misinterpretation thereof.
Look, I know there’s a certain contingent of people here who are mortally embarrassed about the fact that they supported one of the biggest and most transparent scams that humanity has ever seen, and would prefer that absolutely nothing that enabled that scam is ever mentioned again, in any context. Too bad. The PCR test debacle was a key component in creating a “casedemic”, and similar things had happened before 2020. I don’t see how it’s unreasonable to speculate that it might happen again if similar faulty Science™ is deployed.
In any case that was just a passing remark, a single sentence, tangential to the rest of my argument. Why latch onto that as the only thing worth commenting on?
There is a lot of good information around about the rabies thing. Confusing this with covid is erroneous I feel.
I agree with you that the media is often fairly trashy. That, however, doesn’t take away the importance of monitoring rabies. Which I feel is a good thing. I think we are coming from opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. The field biologists and universities are doing good work. Their work should eb published far and wide. You’re coming from the sketchy media/social media side, which do tend to fuck up more than they help. End of the day, the data should be shared. That isn’t in question in my mind. It could be presented better. Or people could just start reading actual sources instead of subscribing to advertising click bait portals. That’s on them.
Some basic reading to start, that beats media stuff:
It is good to monitor as we don’t really want this getting into the stray dog populations. I have traveled around in Asia where it’s a problem and in Taiwan it is very much preventable right now.
