There are also some pretty significant infectious diseases in humans that come from the ocean.

It’s not exactly common, but one of the more disturbing ones I know of off the top of my head is probably Vibrio vulnificans, one of several bacteria known to cause a type of infection that goes by the lovely common name of “flesh-eating disease”, or necrotizing fasciitis to be more technical, which is literally exactly as horrific as it sounds (seriously, I wouldn’t recommend a Google image search). V. vulnificans isn’t nearly as common a cause as culprits like Staphylococcus aureus (especially antibiotic-resistant varieties), and causes a distinct form called “Type II”, but it does uniquely come from exposure to stagnant saline water, which in general isn’t something a lot of people seem to consider as big of a health hazard as they do stagnant freshwater for some reason (maybe due to a mistaken belief that the salt “sterilizes” it or something because it’s a preservative? Who knows), so it’s not always on people’s radar as much when it comes to places you might pick up a horrible disease.

It’s “gender dysphoria”, actually, you might be mixing it up with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (an entirely separate thing).

In terms of consensus, this is p much it right here, there’s nothing binding a given physician to these particular standards, but I’d say a majority of the medical community (at least here in the US) largely agrees that these are the best guidelines for handling anyone of any age dealing with gender dysphoria (or who might be), although obviously with minors, especially pubescent minors, there are additional considerations, but the general consensus seems to be that with proper counseling and consideration, making sure that the patient understands the weight of making permanent decisions about their body, and of course parental consent, giving minors who’ve been determined to likely benefit from medical transition (or even just treatment with puberty blockers, if nothing else) should not be barred from access to it, that proper care for people suffering from gender dysphoria can be potentially life-saving, and that trans youth especially should not be denied the care they need due to the political machinations of people who aren’t even related to them (and likely don’t actually have their best interests in mind).

Anyway, trans people medically transitioning has been occurring for well over a century now, it is not a new phenomenon, just one that has recently been noticed by the mainstream a lot more, and the statistics over that long period of time generally suggest that it is very important for the well-being of a substantial minority of the population.

The idea that is circulating in some circles currently that parents are somehow forcing their children to not conform to gender expectations based on their birth sex, or somehow inducing “gender confusion” in them, has no psychological or medical basis, and if it were to occur in some case, I’m sure the extensive counseling that youth undergo as per the standards of care would be able to find evidence of it (to my knowledge, I have never actually heard of a case like this, unless you count the tragic story of David Reimer being forcibly raised as a girl against his will after a botched circumcision, but that case was entirely one doctor’s unethical social experiment, and if anything actually demonstrates why gender dysphoria should be properly treated, as David always asserted he was a boy even against being told otherwise and forced to dress and behave as a girl, something that I’m sure many trans men can deeply relate to).

Doctors who oppose these standards of care (usually on almost solely political grounds) make up a minority of the medical community. It’s always important to remember that trans people people of all ages have existed for a long time without society falling apart at the seams, and will continue to do so. Don’t let the latest politicized othering of a vulnerable group confuse you.

I’m assuming it’s mostly by a combination of dissolving their cell membranes and pulling moisture out of them.

As someone else mentioned bacteria (unlike animal cells) do have protective cell walls made of a substance called peptidoglycan as well, and it varies how thick these walls are and whether they’re outside or inside the cell membrane (which leads to differences in how bacteria take in alcohol-based dye solutions and stain on microscope plates), so that also plays a role in how vulnerable different bacteria are to organic solvents like alcohol.

Possibly, at least in theory. The epidermal layer of their skin would provide enough protection it would take a very long time, like unless you’re also keeping them alive with an IV as well dehydration or even starvation would definitely get them first. However, if we’re talking a solution of above 90% ethanol here, the process might be quicker, as that would be enough to debride their outer skin cells pretty significantly given some time (and once ethanol penetrated into their internal tissues, then there would start to really be some problems, not least of which that ethanol pulls a lot of water out of cells besides also eating away at their membranes).

There are probably literally tens of millions of more efficient ways to kill someone, but with high enough concentration of ethanol it probably could be done (keep in mind though that ethanol above 90% isn’t like alcohol people drink, like even everclear isn’t more than 80% iirc, and because of how hygroscopic it as and the way it pulls moisture from tissue, the alcohol would rapidly dilute itself during the process).

I don’t know if this is exactly true, but I’ve always heard that 100% ethanol basically doesn’t exist unless it’s stored under some extremely specific conditions, as literally any trace amount of humidity in the environment dilutes it (this is why I said 99% in the above comment, although again, I’m actually not totally certain this is the case, just what I’ve always heard).

Even everclear (which I think is like 75-80%?) will definitely mildly burn your mouth if you try to drink it neat. Personally, I find often even regular hard liquor kind of irritates my mouth and throat (part of why I don’t drink it), and I think this is why mouthwash tends to not actually have all that much alcohol overall (also of course because, even with all the additives to make it unpalatable, desperate people will still try to get drunk off of it).

yeah this is why it’s better to use hydrogen peroxide to sterilize wounds rather than IPA or even ethanol (IPA especially tends to make injuries worse, I’ve noticed).

I forget exactly which bacteria this includes, but I know there are some referred to as “hypolipotrophs” that are known for being able to survive on even microscopically-thin films of lipids on otherwise sterile metallic surfaces, and to survive many forms or sterilization and even some degree of autoclaving in this way. It’s estimated that many can actually survive even on the surfaces of otherwise sterile surgical tools (thankfully, none are known to be pathogenic).

Where did I say anything about a personal attack? I never once said “stop personally attacking me”, or even mentioned myself at all.

I am kind of confused which “incorrect statement” you think you’re correcting, though, because I never said “there are more human cells than bacterial cells in a human body”, I never even said “bacteria make up but a small fraction of the mass or volume of the human body” (although the latter statement would be inarguably correct), I merely said that a human (as in our own cells) has a lot more cells than a single bacterium (one cell). Hundreds of trillions is clearly more than one. So I don’t entirely understand what exactly you thought you were “correcting”, because you were essentially addressing a claim that wasn’t even made (regardless of how accurate it is).

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-many-bacteria-cells-outnumber-human-cells-microbiome-science/amp

It’s about 1.3:1 at most, so very slightly more, but definitely not vastly more, and again (as I’ve said three times now) irrelevant to anything I said. This article includes links to two other sources, including one noting how it’s actually nearly impossible to give a completely accurate general human number on this due to the variance between individuals. In any event, the common citation that there’s 10:1 or some other huge number (which you strongly imply in your comment) is derived from a single discredited study, and the actual number is far less impressive.

But yet again, a bacterium is a single-celled organism, a human is multicellular one. It’s pretty obvious which is going to more vulnerable to being killed by alcohol. Exactly how many individual bacteria are inside a given human body has little to nothing to do with anything I said.

Because the same amount of ethanol is going to be less concentrated in a larger volume, since cells are basically just globs of watery liquid (cytoplasm) inside a bubble of mostly lipids (a cell membrane, although bacteria do also have cell walls, unlike human cells) the same solution of alcohol ends up somewhat more diluted in a larger volume of liquid than it does in a smaller one (you also have to account for the mechanics of osmosis on a larger surface area and other factors like that, but the end result is pretty much the same either way). Even then it’s not a huge difference, and any solution of ethanol concentrated enough to kill a given bacterium would have a decent chance of killing an isolated human cell also, but this hardly matters with the comparatively small concentration of ethanol in mouthwash, especially since the epithelial cells that line your mouth are constantly dying off and sloughing away in large numbers anyway.

The very paper they posted a link to above (as well as the one mentioned in the Nature article I posted, because they both say the same thing) makes it pretty clear that bacteria wins neither. There are about the same number of bacterial cells as human cells in an average human body, and they make up only around 0.2 kg of a human body’s mass.

> Our analysis also updates the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, showing that the number of bacteria in the body is actually of the same order as the number of human cells, and their total mass is about 0.2 kg.

Did you not actually read the abstract on the paper you posted? This literally says the exact same thing as the link I posted, that there’s basically a 1:1 ratio (“on the same order as the number of human cells”), not that there are more. Considering these are both from the same year, I’m assuming they’re maybe actually referencing the same study.

Once again, this isn’t actually relevant because OP clearly wants to know the effects of alcohol on individual bacteria versus human cells (which as I note, are not really going to be very different), as they state at the end of the post, not on the generalized effect of alcohol on the entire bacterial human microbiome.

But, if they did want to know the latter, everything I said still 100% holds anyway (if you were to take just the entire 0.2 kg mass of bacteria from an average human body and expose it to high concentrations of ethanol, it would still pretty definitely die???), and even as a pedantic nitpick your comment states something blatantly incorrect, and the study you posted to supposedly back it up actually contradicts your claim pretty clearly.

this is admittedly really pedantic (although this might actually be more of a popular misconception than I’m thinking), but technically water bears can actually survive (at least in terms of like, actually actively living in) only in a fairly narrow range of conditions, requiring freshwater aquatic habitats in a fairly moderate temperature range (they can live in extremely thin films or tiny droplets of water in otherwise terrestrial environments, but that’s about the most extreme they get when actually living, breathing, eating, and mating), it’s more that they can enter a state of cryptobiosis (called a “tun”) which is incredibly resilient to extremes, up to and including the conditions of outer space or near-absolute zero temperatures (and then having their frozen tun state used in a quantum double-slit experiment, and still being successfully revived after lol).

So with water bears it’s more that they’re really good at weathering extremes, but not necessarily actually living in them per se, whereas bacteria and archaea can often actually exhibit active cellular metabolism and other processes even in some really extreme habitats.

I mostly just mention this because I’ve seen a lot of people say that water bears are “extremophiles”, when really they’re actually somewhat on the fragile side while actively alive, they just have a very resilient hibernation-like state they can enter, basically.

I mostly went with a really huge number to emphasize how even the probably 20-30% ethanol found in mouthwash (that’s a guesstimate, it may actually more or less than that, but I know 40% is around where common hard liquor tends to hover, and I kind of doubt most mouthwash has that much ethanol in it) effects bacterial cells really drastically due to their size, even the amount of alcohol in common wine or even beer is enough to kill a good share of microbes that aren’t specially adapted to be tolerant of alcohol, hence why beer and wine (and equivalents) were the drinks of choice for most people throughout a good portion of history (basically until people started to really figure out the whole water purification thing in the last couple centuries); it was better to be vaguely drunk/hungover all the time than get cholera or dysentery.

Yeah this is part of why I added the “chemicals they’re not specifically adapted to” bit, because to my knowledge you can name practically any harmful chemical and there will be at least one bacterial species that is extremely tolerant of it, if not completely unaffected. There are bacteria that can survive in heavy metal-laden mine runoff so contaminated that it looks like blood and has the pH of white vinegar, there are bacteria which live in steaming sulfuric acid-filled volcanic caldera lakes, there are halobacteria that thrive in bodies of water over ten times the salinity of the ocean, and there are even bacteria that can survive being irradiated (apparently in part by having lots of redundancies in their DNA and being really good at repairing DNA with minimal errors).

And that’s just actual bacteria, because there are also archaea (not actually bacteria, but historically conflated with them) that can survive in such extremely high temperatures that their specially heat-adapted enzymes are actually an indispensable tool in biotech (in particular, PCR makes use of a thermophilic archaeal DNA transcriptase so that it can speed things up with higher temperatures, iirc). Obviously this is different from chemical resistance, but it just goes to show how there are microbes that can survive almost anything.

It does kill cells in our body to some extent, like high concentration ethyl alcohol (like 90% or higher) can cause mild chemical burns in your mouth if you drink it neat. Not to mention the scarring of the liver (although tbf that’s more because of acetaldehyde, the fairly heavily toxic chemical ethanol gets mostly metabolized into).

This being said, it mostly is just a difference of scale; we not only have way more cells in our bodies, but eukaryotic cells are many times larger than (most) bacteria (this obviously varies a lot, but generally it is the case), so they’re far more vulnerable to damage or death by chemical means unless they’re specifically adapted against it.

But I guarantee you, if you somehow exposed every cell in your body at once to a high volume of 99% ethanol, you would not survive it either. The outer membranes of our cells are mostly just a thin film of lipids which organic solvents like ethanol can dissolve, and we don’t even have cell walls like bacteria do to add an extra layer of protection, it’s just that we normally only come into contact with alcohol in comparatively small amounts in a diluted form.

EDIT: also, should probably be mentioned, mouthwash usually does contain other antibacterial ingredients besides just ethanol, and if you just used, say, vodka as mouthwash, it would likely kill some bacteria in your mouth but overall not be nearly as effective (plus everyone would think you were a drunk).

Yeah it seems that a number of people thought it would be a good idea to do that sort of “exposure therapy” with covid early in the pandemic, and it…generally didn’t work out so well for a lot of them.

yeah also summer colds are a thing. Also, even in many areas with hot climates, the winter tends to be cooler and rainy (unless you’re right in the middle of the tropics where seasons don’t really work the same way), which means that people still end up spending more time indoors (especially since even 15 °C can feel cold to someone from a warm climate). It’s really just people packing together in less ventilated spaces which allows viruses to spread more (although with influenza I have also heard that the virus can’t remain viable outside as long in hot weather, and iirc this is even somewhat true of covid, but most transmission happens at fairly close range, anyway).

This is why omicron was able to so easily end up with some genetics from a milder coronavirus that regularly circulates as the “common cold”, because they’re pretty much the same thing, SARS-CoV-19 is essentially just a novel cold virus that humans lacked pre-existing immunity to, and thus it was able to cause far more harm to the body than it normally would’ve. Eventually, the descendants of this wave of Covid will probably become perceived as little more than a somewhat-bad colds as we continue to adapt to its presence (and to some extent, as it continues to adapt to us, as in general it’s actually more advantageous for viruses to keep their hosts alive while still being as virulent as possible, rather than killing them. Viruses in general don’t actually benefit evolutionarily from killing their hosts).

iirc, there are H1N1 influenza strains directly descended from the 1918 pandemic virus that continue to crop up as seasonal flus, and only occasionally does another one pop up from that lineage that causes serious enough illness to be especially noteworthy (“swine flu” back in the early 2010s was actually an example of this if I recall).

water doesn’t specifically cause organ damage in and of itself, but it is possible to basically dilute your body’s ion content by drinking too much in a short period (or else, by not urinating enough for one reason or another, including certain kidney issues). This condition is called hyponatremia (“low sodium”, basically), because the main issue is the blood becoming dilute enough that sodium has trouble reaching the nervous system in the amounts it requires, and this leads to a variety of primarily neurological symptoms (headaches, nausea, poor balance, confusion, and in severe cases seizures and coma), which can somewhat resemble drunkenness, hence the popular (but sort of inaccurate) term “water intoxication”.

Luckily, in most cases it resolves on its own without too much trouble, and only very rarely becomes actually life-threatening. The one thing you have to watch out for with it is that the symptoms can actually sometimes be mistaken for dehydration, which can obviously lead to more water consumption, and a worsening of symptoms (the sign to look out for is whether ones urine is dark-colored or totally clear). Drinking electrolyte drink mixes can help prevent hyponatremia.

So basically, no (realistic) amount of water is bad for most of your organs, except arguably your nervous system under extreme and fairly unusual circumstances. But in general, there’s no such thing as “too much water” on a habitual level.

Yeah I was kind of thinking how errors in promoters could be thought of like issues in the g-code (the programming language that 3D printers, laser cutters, etc. use) leading to certain layers not being printed and stuff like that.

Of course one aspect where this metaphor really breaks down is the time it takes to 3D print something versus a protein to fold into shape; the former takes anywhere from minutes to hours (depending on the size of the print, resolution, etc.), whereas the latter somehow occurs in just fractions of a second (and the mechanics of exactly how it happens so fast is still not entirely clear, which is why we still don’t really have accurate computer models of protein folding, and the field of protein engineering is still fairly nascent. Once we do have a better understanding, synthetic biology will enter a new age in which it will become not only possible to use tools like CRISPR Cas9 to edit genomes by inserting or removing pre-existing genes like we do now, but actually build entirely new genes from scratch, for novel proteins that have never existed in nature. We’ll basically have the most powerful pre-existing system for nano-engineering right at our fingertips).

yeah genes are just sequences of codons which each correspond to an amino acid subunit of a protein, certain amino acids have to be in just the right places in a protein’s structure for it to not end up as a useless squiggly mess (useless at best, potentially toxic at worst, just look at the formation of amyloid plaques), and if even one base pair is off in DNA, that changes a given codon to another one (meaning there will be the wrong amino acid, and the whole protein is probably ruined).

I do 3D printing, and kind of think protein synthesis and folding as similar in a certain way; when you’re 3D printing something (on a FDM printer, at least), all it takes is one little crossing of one layer being set down wrong, and before you know it, you have an unrecognizable mass of plastic spaghetti that doesn’t resemble what you were originally trying to print in the slightest, and you have no choice but to toss the whole thing in the recycle bin and start over. The problem is, with misfolded proteins there sometimes isn’t any “starting over” if they’re essential enough to a cell, and there often isn’t an analogue to a recycle bin either (so some misfolded proteins can just keep accumulating until there’s severe disease).

Basically, in both cases all it takes is one small error, and an entire print/protein ceases to be functional.

This is why mutations that lead to disease are generally more common than ones which end up being beneficial (as for an organism to benefit, it basically takes the altered protein actually being better than the original, or good for something else).

I’ve brought this up several times here, but evolution doesn’t “optimize” things (at least in the way an intelligent being would), it’s a mindless process that stumbles onto “good enough” solutions for keeping organisms alive long enough to reproduce in a given niche. If evolution optimized things, we’d probably have really different anatomy.

Another interesting (possible) example of this was the very weird “Morgellons disease” phenomenon during the ‘00s.

Basically, a bunch of people around the US (and maybe elsewhere) suddenly began going to doctors complaining of some really bizarre symptoms, such as itching and general skin irritation, lesions, sensations of “crawling” under the skin, panic (and iirc some also reported memory loss), and strangest of all, the appearance of inexplicable colorful fibers in their lesions (which were claimed by the patients to be growing out of their skin), and in some cases also supposed sightings of tiny black gnats or flies exiting the lesions.

Initially, some of the medical community took the whole thing seriously, and I believe there was even a CDC investigation to see if it was in fact some novel epidemic, but fairly quickly a lot of doctors grew a lot more skeptical when they couldn’t really find any signs of any sort of parasite or pathogen whatsoever in the patients (I think it was reported briefly that a number of them had previously suffered Lyme disease, but this may not have turned out to be a significant enough correlation), and also the fact that lab tests of the mysterious fibers revealed mundane, household sources for the most part (implying that patients were placing them in the lesions themselves, and probably creating the lesions with excessive scratching).

A lot of medical professionals dismissed the whole thing as an unusually-widespread example of Münchausen syndrome (which is p much a fancy medical way of saying “bullshitting for attention”), but there were also some more charitable assessments that it was actually an unusual epidemic of delusional parasitosis (where, again because of the nocebo effect, a person actually starts experiencing signs of parasitic infestation simply by psyching themselves into believing they have parasites) spreading as a culture-bound syndrome (partly due to the internet).

In my humble opinion, I think it was probably some mixture of both genuine psychogenic illness and Münchausen.

From what I understand, the whole thing calmed down after a few years and people stopped reporting “Morgellons” symptoms mostly, although I’ve heard it still occasionally pops up as a thing even to this day.

It just goes to show that, even though there’s a popular perception of culture-bound syndromes as a phenomenon of less enlightened past times and “primitive” cultures, something that we educated Westerners are surely above, the thing is we’re not, we’re still human and just as subject to these things as anyone else, really no matter how “rational” we think we are.

There were terrestrial predatory crocodiles, but they weren’t anywhere near the size of large predatory dinosaurs (nor even present day saltwater crocodiles, let alone the even larger aquatic crocodiles that existed in the Mesozoic).

Last I’d heard, most marine reptiles from the Mesozoic were not assumed to be warm-blooded because non-archosaur diapsids like that simply weren’t assumed to have evolved endothermy, but I haven’t really kept up on speculation about that, so it’s possible the consensus has shifted with at least some of them (as obviously dinosaurs themselves have only been widely-assumed to be endothermic relatively recently).