• Quimby [any, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I'm quite certain the tabloid article is sensationalist and probably made up out of whole cloth.

    However, I'll also add that much of the global south is deeply poor. Parasites and similar problems remain extremely common in India, for example. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people still dealt with that in the DPRK. Especially people who may have been living in the wilderness for days or weeks. Heck, if you drank river water in the frickin Rocky Mountains, it'd be like 50-50 whether you ended up with parasites.

    • OperationOgre [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I hike and backpack frequently and I always take water filtration or purification with me. Drinking mountain water will give you giardia.

      • Nagarjuna [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Mountain water has giardia because ranchers don't range their cattle properly and backpackers can't be bothered to walk away from lakes to shit. Giardia is a parasite of civilization.

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          no one's claiming the mountains are immoral for having unclean water just that it's not safe to drink the water

          • Nagarjuna [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It's still way safer to drink mountain water than like, water in a park though, get it? The wilderness isn't dirty, agriculture and tourism are dirty.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              The wilderness isn’t dirty

              No, i assure you the wilderness is absolutely disgusting. Parasites are a problem across vast swaths of the world. There are all kinds of poorly researched tropical diseases. North America has ticks that will bite you and cause all kinds of horrific auto-immune diseases. Nature wants to kill you and consume your biomass and it is not shy about it.

              • Nagarjuna [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                They absolutely are, but they're a problem in cities too! The only exception is if you have regular access to filtered water and hand washing, which is a huge if. With the exception of western cities, wild areas are far cleaner than ones impacted by agriculture, sedentism and industry.

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Heck, if you drank river water in the frickin Rocky Mountains, it’d be like 50-50 whether you ended up with parasites.

      I have drunk so much mountain lake water and am okay. That's not to say I don't have parasites, just that they're chill parasites.

    • Mindfury [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      does anyone else remember that article from a few months back where an MRI revealed that some chinese guy was chock full of parasites in all of his muscles, organs and like half his brain because he refused to stop earing raw pork?

      edit: I just googled it and apparently those images have been going around for years but it came back to :reddit-logo: last month. Was literally a repost from 2016