#Europe Animal Healthcare

[creativeera]

The Europe Animal Healthcare Market is in trends by increasing pet adoption amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Animal healthcare deals with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases that affect animals. Pet owners in Europe are increasingly spending on quality animal feed, nutrition and healthcare products to ensure the overall well-being of their pets. Veterinary care services for pets include vaccination, surgeries and treatment of ailments. Growing urbanization coupled with rising incomes have led to increasing pet ownership, especially dogs and cats over recent years in Europe. The bond between pets and their owners has strengthened amid the outbreak of COVID-19 as people sought companionship working from home.

The Europe animal healthcare market is estimated to be valued at USD 15,270.3 Mn in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 21,575.4 Mn by 2031, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.1% from 2024 to 2031. Key Takeaways Key players: Key players operating in the Europe Animal Healthcare are Merck & Co., Inc., Virbac, Dechra Pharmaceuticals, Vetoquinol S.A., Zoetis Inc., Ceva Santé Animale, Bayer AG, Elanco, Evonik Industries AG, Archer Daniels Midland Company, Cargill, Incorporated. Growing demand: Rising pet adoption, increasing disposable incomes, growing awareness about pet health are fueling the demand for animal healthcare products and services in Europe. Pet owners are willing to spend more on premium pet food, nutraceuticals and veterinary care. Global expansion: Leading players are expanding their manufacturing facilities and distribution networks across major countries in Europe to tap the growing pet care market. Companies are also focusing on development of novel drugs and therapeutic areas through collaborative research efforts. Market key trends: One of the key trends gaining traction in the Europe Animal Healthcare Market Size is customized pet foods. Manufacturers are focusing on development of customized dietary solutions tailored to pet's breed, size, age, and medical conditions. Companies are incorporating advanced nutritional analysis and customized recipes for pet foods to cater to individual pet requirements.

Porter's Analysis Threat of new entrants: Low barriers to entry due to requirements and regulations. Bargaining power of buyers: Large buyer base leads to more negotiating power. Bargaining power of suppliers: Few suppliers with differentiated products have more influence. Threat of new substitutes: Presence of alternative treatments poses threat of substitution. Competitive rivalry: Intense completion between global and regional players to gain market share. Geographical regions where the Europe animal healthcare market is concentrated in terms of value include Germany, France, UK, Italy and Spain. These countries collectively accounted for over 60% of market share in 2024 owing to high pet ownership and rising animal welfare expenditure. The fastest growing region for the Europe animal healthcare market is Eastern Europe. Countries like Russia, Poland, Romania etc. are witnessing double digit growth due to growing livestock industry, increasing meat consumption and rising awareness about animal health. This growth is further aided by expanding veterinary services and growing pet adoption in urban areas.

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Vaagisha brings over three years of expertise as a content editor in the market research domain. Originally a creative writer, she discovered her passion for editing, combining her flair for writing with a meticulous eye for detail. Her ability to craft and refine compelling content makes her an invaluable asset in delivering polished and engaging write-ups.

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[myblogscmi]

Europe Animal Healthcare Market Is Estimated To Witness High Growth Owing To Increasing Focus On Animal Health And Welfare

The Europe Animal Healthcare Market Is Estimated To Be Valued At US$ 14,096.3 Million In 2022 And Is Expected To Exhibit A CAGR Of 4.8% Over The Forecast Period 2022-2030, As Highlighted In A New Report Published By Coherent Market Insights. A) Market Overview: The Europe Animal Healthcare Market Encompasses Various Products And Services That Are Essential For Maintaining The Health And Well-Being Of Animals. These Include Pharmaceuticals, Vaccines, Feed Additives, And Diagnostic Tests. The Market Is Driven By The Increasing Focus On Animal Health And Welfare, As Well As The Growing Prevalence Of Diseases Among Animals. The Need For These Products Is Further Fueled By The Rising Demand For Animal-Derived Products, Such As Meat, Milk, And Eggs. B) Market Key Trends: One Key Trend In The Europe Animal Healthcare Market Is The Growing Adoption Of Preventive Healthcare Practices For Animals. Pet Owners And Farmers Are Increasingly Realizing The Importance Of Proactive Measures To Ensure The Health And Longevity Of Their Animals. This Includes Regular Veterinary Check-Ups, Vaccination Programs, And Proper Nutrition. For Example, In The Livestock Sector, Vaccination Plays A Critical Role In Preventing The Spread Of Infectious Diseases And Improving Productivity. C) PEST Analysis: Political: Animal Healthcare Regulations Vary Across European Countries, With Each Country Having Its Own Set Of Guidelines Regarding Product Approvals And Usage. Harmonization Of Regulations Is Essential For The Smooth Functioning Of The Market. Economic: The Animal Healthcare Market Is Driven By Economic Factors Such As Disposable Income, Consumer Spending On Pets, And Government Investments In Livestock Healthcare Infrastructure. Social: Changing Consumer Preferences Towards Pet Ownership And Increasing Awareness About Animal Welfare Are Driving The Demand For Animal Healthcare Products. Technological: Advancements In Diagnostic Tools, Digital Health Platforms, And Telemedicine Are Revolutionizing The Way Animal Healthcare Services Are Delivered, Making It More Convenient And Efficient. D) Key Takeaways: - The Europe Animal Healthcare Market Is Expected To Witness High Growth, Exhibiting A CAGR Of 4.8% Over The Forecast Period. - The Region Is Projected To Dominate The Market Due To Factors Such As Increasing Pet Ownership, Rising Awareness About Preventive Healthcare, And Government Initiatives For Livestock Health Management. - Key Players Operating In The Europe Animal Healthcare Market Include Merck & Co., Inc., Virbac, Dechra Pharmaceuticals Plc., Vetoquinol S.A., Zoetis Inc., Ceva Santé Animale, Bayer AG, Elanco, Evonik Industries AG, And Archer Daniels Midland Company. These Companies Are Focused On Product Development, Strategic Collaborations, And Mergers And Acquisitions To Gain A Competitive Edge In The Market. In Conclusion, The Europe Animal Healthcare Market Is Poised For Significant Growth Due To The Increasing Focus On Animal Health And Welfare. The Adoption Of Preventive Healthcare Practices, Favorable Government Regulations, And Advancements In Technology Are Driving The Market Forward. With Key Players Actively Investing In Research And Development, The Market Is Expected To Witness Innovative Solutions That Cater To The Evolving Needs Of Animal Healthcare

[gauricmi]

Europe Animal Healthcare Market Is Estimated To Witness High Growth Owing To Increasing Animal Health Concerns And Growing Pet Ownership

The Europe animal healthcare market is estimated to be valued at US$ 14,096.3 million in 2022 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 4.8% over the forecast period 2022-2030.

A) Market Overview:

The Europe animal healthcare market focuses on providing medical care and treatment for animals, including pets and livestock. With the growing awareness and concern about animal health, there has been an increased demand for various healthcare products such as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and feed additives. These products play a crucial role in preventing and treating diseases in animals, improving their overall health and well-being.

B) Market Dynamics:

1. Increasing Animal Health Concerns: With the increasing trend of pet humanization and the growing awareness about the health and well-being of animals, there has been a rise in demand for animal healthcare products. Pet owners are now more proactive in seeking preventive care and treatment options for their pets, resulting in a higher demand for pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and other healthcare products.

2. Growing Pet Ownership: The number of pet owners in Europe is steadily increasing, leading to a surge in demand for animal healthcare products. Pets are considered as part of the family, and owners are willing to spend on their healthcare needs. This trend is driving the growth of the animal healthcare market in Europe.

C) SWOT Analysis:

- Strengths:

1. Technological Advancements in Europe Animal Healthcare Market: Rapid advancements in veterinary medicine and technology have led to the development of innovative healthcare products and treatment options.

2. Strong Distribution Network: The presence of established distribution channels and veterinary clinics across Europe enables easy access to animal healthcare products.

- Weaknesses:

1. High Cost of Animal Healthcare: The cost of animal healthcare products and treatments can be a limiting factor for pet owners, especially in the case of complex procedures or chronic diseases.

2. Lack of Awareness in Some Regions: Despite the growing awareness about animal health, there are still certain regions in Europe where pet owners have limited awareness and access to animal healthcare products.

- Opportunities:

1. Increasing Focus on Preventive Care: There is a shift towards preventive care in the animal healthcare industry, with an emphasis on vaccinations, regular health check-ups, and nutrition. This presents opportunities for companies to develop innovative preventive care products.

2. Growing Livestock Industry: The livestock industry in Europe is witnessing growth, and there is a need for effective healthcare solutions to maintain the health and productivity of the animals. This opens up opportunities for animal healthcare companies to cater to the needs of the livestock sector.

- Threats:

1. Stringent Regulatory Environment: The animal healthcare industry is subject to strict regulations and approvals, which can pose challenges for companies in terms of product development and market entry.

2. Competition from Generic and Over-the-Counter Products: The availability of generic and over-the-counter animal healthcare products may pose a threat to the market share of established players.

D) Key Takeaways:

- The Europe animal healthcare market is expected to witness high growth, exhibiting a CAGR of 4.8% over the forecast period, due to increasing animal health concerns and growing pet ownership.

- In terms of regional analysis, Europe is expected to be the fastest-growing and dominating region in the animal healthcare market, owing to the presence of a large pet population and a well-developed veterinary infrastructure.

- Key players operating in the Europe animal healthcare market include Merck & Co., Inc., Virbac, Dechra Pharmaceuticals Plc., Vetoquinol S.A., Zoetis Inc., Ceva Santé Animale, Bayer AG, Elanco, Evonik Industries AG, and Archer Daniels Midland Company. These companies are focusing on product innovation, strategic partnerships, and expansion to maintain a competitive edge in the market.

[arminreindl]

Mooing crocodiles

Some interesting news on croc vocalisation I completely forgot to talk about. A recent paper on the West African Dwarf Crocodile (Osteolaemus tetraspis) revealed a before unknown diversity in noises it is able to produce. By recording captive animals and comparing the noises made by them to recordings suspected to be those of wild individuals, researchers could identify FOUR new types of calls not seen previously in crocodilians.

These calls range from low frequency sounds like "drums" (short) and "rumbles" (long) to more higher frequency sounds like "gusts" and what the scientists refer to as "moos".

Though the paper itself didn't include sound files (to my knowledge), you can hear the "mooing" sound and some others around the 16 minute mark in this here podcast Podcasts | Weekly: Antimatter falls down; Virtual healthcare comes with a price; What’s causing Europe’s insect apocalypse? | New Scientist

Croc vocalisation is a generally underappreciated field of research that usually gets little attention, no doubt because many pass of crocodiles as silent animals when really they can be quite vocal and have a surprisingly broad range, small forms like the dwarf crocodiles especially. This can even be seen in this study, as the wild sounds were only recorded on "accident" by a study focused on elephants.

Also for those unfamiliar with dwarf crocodiles, here's an image of one.

[insipid-drivel]

Toxins, Venom, and Poisons in Historical Western Medicine: How Are We Not Extinct From Doing Some Of This To Ourselves?

This piece is an involuntary piece inspired by @writing-with-sophia's awesome post "Poison list", which is an accurate and succinct list of commonly known (and ancient!) poisons, venoms, and toxins that have been and were used for causing poisoning in ancient and recent history. I wanted to write this because what struck me by their post crossing my dash was, the sheer number of poisons listed that were - and even still are - used as mainstays for healthcare around the world throughout the ages!

OBLIGATORY DON'T BE A DUMBASS PSA: If you're planning on incorporating these poisons into your HISTORICAL-era writing, it's also important to remember that many of them were used for medicinal purposes at one time, too, and it's great you're interested in learning about the subject! And also, you shouldn't try ANY of these! I will not tell you how to do it at home if you DM me, so don't! You are not appropriately trained to do it! You will harm or kill yourself and possibly your loved ones if you fuck around with any of these and it will be 100% your fault and you absolutely should feel bad bout it! I've seen some of you idiots believe 4chan posts about making home-grown crystals using recipes for actual mustard gas and seen you being wheeled into the ER on the news! I will not feel bad if you get yourself hurt if you screw around with any of these plants, elements, or animals!

Resource blog plugs and PSA over, now for the Hilariously Poisonous Medicines:

If you're writing something that's meant to take place prior to the advent of our more modern understanding of poisons, venoms, and toxins, factoring in "this is toxic to me NOW, but what about 500 years ago?" can add a lot of opportunities for interesting plot elements to your story.

These can include someone accidentally poisoning themselves with a toxic drug or substance that wouldn't have killed them if they'd handled it properly - like tansy? Grows all over the place in Europe and England? That'll kill you if you harvest it too late in the season, but it's good for intestinal parasites when it's harvested early in the year and processed right.

Did the lady's maid really kill her mistress with belladonna? Or was she trying to secretly help her mistress get rid of an unwanted pregnancy?

The protagonist's children can't survive to make it to weaning age! Is the wetnurse a poisoner, or does the milkman hide that he sells sour milk by pouring Borax into it so no one could taste it and has no idea he's killing his clients' babies?

Nuance and cultural mores regarding historical views about poisons and toxins can make writing even more fun, dynamic, and interesting! Explore 'em!

Just... please don't try any of this crap yourself. You will poison yourself, it will hurt, you will die, and you will hurt the entire time you're dying. Using OP's master list alone, here's the flip side of these lethal beasts through the eyes of our distant ancestors who believed illness was caused by "vapors", "bad air", and "imbalanced humors":

Hemlock:

Used across multiple different cultures in history. When properly administered to treat a disease, poison hemlock was used to treat asthma, whooping cough, bronchitis, joint/bone pain, muscle cramps, and insomnia. Hemlock was most often used as a sedative and antispasmodic.

Arsenic:

Arsenic is a heavy metal, and so has been used in everything from making specialty dyes for wallpapers (Scheele's green is the most infamous arsenic-based paint; Queen Victoria once had a guestroom in her palace redone with Scheele's green wallpaper. The first dignitary to stay there had to be carried out and taken to emergency care after breathing astronomical amounts of arsenic dust from the wallpaper's paint), to medicine. Arsenic was especially commonly used in history to treat skin ailments ranging from acne, to psoriasis, to syphilis sores. It was also sometimes prescribed for menstrual cramps, upset stomachs, colic, and arthritis, among many, many other things.

Cyanide:

Uh... I have literally never found any evidence of cyanide in medicine, outside of its use in modern medicine as part of certain chemical lab tests for measuring urine ketone bodies that involve no contact with a patient whatsoever. Cyanide literally works in less than a few seconds to render your entire body incapable of absorbing OR using oxygen in your lungs or already existing in your blood. Cyanide is really only good at making things that breathe not breathe anymore.

Nightshade:

There are a lot of different "nightshades", so being specific is essential here. Potatoes are nightshades. Tomatoes are nightshades. Calling anything a "nightshade" does not inherently mean it's lethally toxic. Belladonna is probably the most notorious of the "deadly" nightshades, but to this day, is still used medicinally, and would actually be seen as a health and cosmetic mainstay in historical fiction, especially if your setting is in Italy!

Belladonna is an Italian portmanteau for "beautiful woman", because tinctures (water-based drops) of belladonna were commonly used by Italian women as eyedrops to dilate their eyes and appear more attractive, aroused, and desirable. Today, belladonna's eye-dilating effects are still used by optometrists to dilate the pupils! Belladonna has been, and still sometimes is used as an NSAID, general painkiller, motion sickness treatment, asthma medication, and even as a treatment for IBS.

Ricin:

As OP said, Ricin is derived from the toxin found in Castor Beans, and is surprisingly new as an official "the only reason this is made is to make someone dead" poison. Not only is ricin a popular "nobody would think to test for this!" choice in mystery/thriller writing, but it has been used for political assassinations in real life before. Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian anti-Communist dissenter and writer, was killed in 1978 with a 1.7mm diameter ricin-coated pellet shot into his thigh muscle by an unidentified assailant using a modified umbrella as a gun. He died 4 days later.

Historically, castor OIL has been used for medicinal purposes, especially for treating constipation, inducing labor in pregnancy, and as a topical skin moisturizer. If you've ever watched the opening scene in Disney's "Peter Pan", when the childrens' mother is trying to give them a spoonful of medicine each, she's actually giving them castor oil! Castor oil tastes really bad (so much so that flavorings like cinnamon were often added to try to muffle the taste), so the childrens' reluctance and disgust at their mom making them take their medicine is very realistic for the era the movie came out in!

Strychnine:

Another lethal poison that started life as a medicine/food additive. Strychnine is no longer used medicinally at all today, but historically, it was used to stimulate the heart, treat bladder and bowel incontinence, and limb palsy. Strychnine is a deadly-powerful muscle stimulant that, as a poison, causes horrifyingly painful full-body strictures (spasms) and destroys the cardiovascular system. (Fun fact: Strychnine and hydrochloric acid were historically mixed into cheap vodka to make knock-off gin, especially during the Georgian Era in England if the brewer didn't have or couldn't afford juniper berries!)

Snake Venom:

Seriously, do your research before you write an actual, real snake species using venom they don't produce! The Big 3 Forms Of Snake Venom are: Hemotoxic, Neurotoxic, and Cytotoxic. Specific snake species exclusively generate the same kind of venom (so a hemotoxic snake will ALWAYS produce baby snakes that also make hemotoxic venom). Aristotle himself wrote in 380 BC that certain snake venoms could be applied for treating fevers, smallpox, and leprosy, and there is even some evidence in the historical record prior to the 1800s that different cultures have experimented throughout the eons with using venom for converting into antivenom, but I've never found a source citing anyone making a successful form of antivenom until around the 1850s.

Digitalis:

OP really nailed the important thing about Digitalis, and that is it's cardiac benefits for certain people - particularly for treating congestive heart failure. Vincent van Gogh was actually prescribed epilepsy medication that likely contained Digitalis, aka Foxglove, and there are some prevailing theories about van Gogh's love of bright yellow paint as being either caused or exacerbated by the symptoms associated with digitalis use, which can cause an attraction to and increased visual sensitivity to the color yellow. In several portraits, including one of his own psychiatrist, van Gogh shows subjects presented alongside foxglove flowers. Digitalis is absolutely lethal if consumed or taken without expert guidance, however, because it's the mother ingredient of Digoxin. Digoxin isn't used as frequently as it used to be a few decades ago, but it's still used and prescribed today for certain forms of heart failure and heart disease. Digoxin was also, at one time, was also sometimes used to induce chemical abortions.

Lead:

Dear god, lead. Not only is it so slow to kill you that you'll think that the only way to manage your symptoms is with more lead, but lead poisoning can be a life-long crisis for a person who is regularly exposed to it. Humans have used lead for everything from plumbing, to paint, to our cutlery, to cosmetics, to medicine. While yes, it is very possible to ingest enough lead in a single sitting to die within hours or days, most sufferers of lead poisoning experience it for years or decades before the symptoms become obvious. Some archaeologists believe that the Romans used lead cutlery because lead has a unique reaction when we lick it: when you have lead coating your tongue, it makes EVERYTHING you eat suddenly taste 10x better. I learned this myself from going target-shooting with my mom at a gun rage as a teenager, inhaled gunsmoke (which contains lead), and went for lunch immediately after. Even though I was just eating a $5 meal from In-N-Out, my burger tasted so good I thought I was gonna have to change my pants. When I asked the rangemaster at the target place about it later, he literally said, "Oh yeah, lead makes the worst cooking taste like heaven."

The ancient Romans ate a lot of rotten, spoiled, and sour food, and so lead would've made it easier to eat it back then. But the neurological effects of lead poisoning are nightmarish. It's suspected that, in America, the #1 reason we had so many active serial killers in the country from the 1940s-2000s was because of leaded gasoline. Ever since leaded gasoline was banned? Serial and random violent crime rates have dramatically gone down, especially in metropolitan cities. Ancient Rome, too, gradually became an increasingly violent city as its population went up and its reliance on lead did. We're only just now starting to figure out how toxic lead actually is, so go nuts with using it as a plot element regarding subjects like "Why Are You Like This?"

Mercury:

Mercury is also known as quicksilver, because in spite of being a heavy metal, the temperature at which it melts into a liquid is very, very low compared to most other metals. The first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, was rumored to be so obsessed with the notion of immortality that he would send his doctors on doomed voyages around the world searching for a legendary substance that would, indeed, make him immortal. Legend has it that some doctors who were tasked with the job found out about the last guys, and produced mercury before Emperor Qin Shi Huang and cried, "Here it is! I got it!" so they wouldn't end up doomed to drown at sea. Qin Shi Huang became so obsessed with ingesting and medicating himself with mercury that, when his legendary tomb was being constructed, he had a small-yet-accurate-to-scale map of China+the known world about the size of a football field with every body of water full of fountains of running mercury in his burial chamber. His tomb was rediscovered in the last couple of decades after archaeologists found suspiciously high levels of mercury in the soil on top of a "hill" that had been sitting in the countryside untouched for thousands of years. It turned out to be Qin Shi Huang's long-lost tomb.

Since those days, mercury has closely been associated in early medicine as a sort of cure-all, since it literally kills anything it touches (including people). Captain Blackbeard himself, the most notorious pirate in Western history (Western specifically; google who Zheng Yi Sao was), was known or widely believed to be a syphilis sufferer, and desperately sought infusions of mercury from ships he'd capture (and the doctors onboard) to treat it, believing like everyone did that mercury could cure syphilis. It can't. They just didn't understand back then that syphilis starts off surface-level, and then eats your brain years after the initial infection.

Aconite:

Again, ridiculously toxic outside of specific medicinal applications that still aren't safe today! Aconite, or wolfsbane, has historically been used as a heart sedative (for slowing the heart), diuretic, painkiller, and even used to induce sweating. Evidence of wolfsbane being used for medicinal purposes has been spotted here and there over thousands of years throughout the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Empires, but its original use came about in Ancient Greece for hunting and culling wolves by poisoning bait-food with it. That form of hunting died out long before the European Middle Ages, but the name "wolfsbane" stuck. Mostly because in the Middle Ages, a lot of people believed werewolves were a huge problem, and kept wolfsbane handy to deter said werewolves.

Thallium:

Today, thallium is mostly used in the production of camera and eyeglass lenses. Before its toxicity was known about, it wasn't strange to hear of thallium being used topically to treat fungal infections like ringworm. Thallium was also sporadically used in treating typhus and tuberculosis, along with a wide array of sexually transmitted diseases.

This list doesn't even touch the tip of the toxic iceberg when it comes to the sheer quantity of hilariously dangerous toxins people have, or still continue, to use for medicinal purposes! In a Victorian-era English London middle-class townhouse setting alone, there were dozens and dozens of ways to poison or otherwise harm yourself just by going about your daily life. So, if you've got a period piece you're working on, or are just bored, you can pick an exact date and time in our history and learn just how terrifyingly comfortable our ancestors were with upsettingly dangerous substances and home remedies. You can also watch a massive docuseries, called "Hidden Killers" and hosted by historian Suzannah Lipscomb, among other historians and archaeologists, which deep-dives into the hidden and unknown dangers of living in eras from Tudor-Era England, to the Post-WWII Reconstruction Age.

As a final note: I am NOT bashing Chinese or Eastern medicinal practices here, and in fact deliberately have gone out of my way to not include any references toward culturally-sanctioned medicinal practices in Eastern and Southeastern Asia. This post is specifically related to the history of WESTERN medicines and their associated history. I am not, nor have I ever been, a doctor of any traditional Eastern medicinal practices, and do not pretend to know better. Sinophobes are unwelcome in my blog space.

[aristotels]

How would a "proletariat artist" that doesn't already work for a big name studio even be expected to earn an income after a proletarian revolution, assuming they don't just take up a different career path and do art strictly as a hobby from that point on? (Sorry if this ask got sent twice, my internet's glitchy today)

well, jobs for artists wont just disappear over night, art is very much neccessary. there will still be need for design, for entertainment, all kinds of things. proleteriat isnt expected to just live and work.

if you wonder what happens to independent artists, theres also no need to worry. i do live in a capitalist country as do most of us in this hemisphere, but i have something called "independent artist" status, which means my art is supported by the state, and i had to go through a whole ordeal to show that i, to quote, contribute to the culture of the country. i am expected to constantly work on art, i have a duty to participate in public exhibitions, and so on. in return my healthcare and my pension are covered by the state. i am also relieved of taxes which means that i get a good tax return. all of this is not much because, well, its still a capitalist country.

also my country supports art through frequent grants; grants for novels, writers, movie scripts, productions, art exhibitions, etc. i cant live solely off that, but obv, in socialism things would be a bit different and art would be more affordable to the proleteriat to enjoy, and it would be funded because art is not a luxury but a neccessity to the public life. whats the point of a 6 (or less) hours workday if you cant go see a movie or a play or read a book after it?

in fact id say that independent artists would be MUCH better off under socialism. i dont have to worry about my pension or healthcare, i am able to apply for grants and that way fund myself. i make nothing from commissions and the capital market is terrifying; if i relied solely upon that, i probably wouldnt be able to make art. so far the grants i got from the state have been the most reliable ones.

and this is all in an ex-socialist country so i assume that under socialism it could only improve. it would be a liberation for the artists, not the opposite. i think its clear to say weve all seen soviet animated films, works of their painters, then yugoslavian sculpture and animation which received the first short animated oscar in europe. i rly dont understand why my fellow colleagues are so terrified that they keep siding with the burgeoisie interests which are the ones keeping them in their chains. art doesnt stop and it wont disappear.

[chris-prank]

Martin!? MARTIN!!?!?!? ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF

Ahem...so I wanted to ask what kind of apocalypse happened in Martins world? If you left it vague on purpose then you don't have to answer this ask ofc :)

I’m happy to tell you more about what happened 😆 and that Martin caught your interest 😏

･*:.｡..｡.:*･*:.｡..｡.:*･

So, when Martin was around 20 years old, violent natural disasters began to happen all around the world more and more frequently. Even countries that were mostly safe from it before were not spared this time. It’s almost like nature itself was turning against humanity. It all ranged from earthquakes that entirely shook Europe, to astronomical tsunamis that almost wiped islands in Southeast Asia. Weirdly, the natural disasters only seemed to become less intense when half of the human population was wiped.

The worst part was the initial aftermath, when the people had lost access to a lot of sources of food and healthcare, especially considering the number of old diseases that came back because of it. It’s like they were brought back to the medieval times! But years after years mankind started to rebuild itself, small villages appearing all around the globe. Soon enough things were back to a somewhat normal pace, and some might even say it is better than their life before the apocalypse.

I was very inspired by the anime “Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou” for the post apocalyptic world that Martin lives in as well as the apocalypse itself! I also took inspiration from our real world, since natural disasters are current problems that a lot of people have to face.

[djuvlipen]

ʒuvlipen (n.): feminism

★ About

-> Marxist feminist learning

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-> This blog is mostly about sharing news and articles relating to Romani rights and Romani history, with a special focus on women and girls.

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I don't follow back minors and I won't reply to you if you are mean or rude to me. I am here on my free time and I don't have the time or energy to get into arguments with people I don't know. I'd rather block or ignore you instead

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-> Intersections of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class: History and Future of the Romani Women’s Movement, by Jelena Jovanović, Angéla Kóczé, and Lídia Balogh (x)

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[covid-safer-hotties]

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SARS-CoV-2 is now circulating out of control worldwide. The only major limitation on transmission is the immune environment the virus faces. The disease it causes, COVID-19, is now a risk faced by most people as part of daily life.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities.

Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s.

The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth.

Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time.

These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio and dracunculiasis. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, measles and rubella. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery and recognition, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade.

These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others.

An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities1.

Rat climbing a ship's rigging. Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s. The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower2). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth. Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time. These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century3-5 on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s6 (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals7,8. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio11,12 and dracunculiasis13. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws14,15, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis16,17, onchocerciasis18,19, measles and rubella20-30. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal31-33 and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe34,35, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides36,37 to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis38,39.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades41-43. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola44-46, Marburg47,48), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah49,50. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Pigs in close proximity to humans. Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths51.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population52 (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery53 and recognition54-56, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat57-60, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit61-65. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet66-69, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Group of bats roosting in a cave. Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats68). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals70-71 – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade. These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals72. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans73-75, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species76-78. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats79 – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others80.

Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world, circa June 2009 Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world. Credit: Jpatokal An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries81-83.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Oklahoma’s Strategic National Stockpile. Credit: DVIDS Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated84. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype85,86) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly87. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

UK National Covid Memorial Wall. Credit: Dominic Alves Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades88. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries89,90. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades91,92. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Mpox virus particles. Credit: NIAID And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category93 in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying94,95. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

This is the previously unthinkable future we will live in from now on in terms of our approach to infectious disease.

What may be controlled instead is information. Another lesson of the pandemic is that if there is no testing and reporting of cases and deaths, a huge amount of real human suffering can be very successfully swept under the rug. Early in 2020, such practices – blatant denial that there was any virus in certain territories, outright faking of COVID-19 statistics, and even resorting to NPIs out of sheer desperation but under false pretense that it is not because of COVID-19 – were the domain of failed states and less developed dictatorships. But in 2023 most of the world has adopted such practices – testing is limited, reporting is infrequent, or even abandoned altogether – and there is no reason to expect this to change. Information control has replaced infection control.

After a while it will not even be possible to assess the impact of what is happening by evaluating excess mortality, which has been the one true measure not susceptible to various data manipulation tricks. As we get increasingly removed from the pre-COVID-19 baselines and the initial pandemic years are subsumed into the baseline for calculating excess mortality, excess deaths will simply disappear by the power of statistical magic. Interestingly, countries such as the UK, which has already incorporated two pandemic years in its five-year average, are still seeing excess deaths, which suggests the virus is an ongoing and growing problem.

It should also be stressed that this radical shift in our approach to emerging infectious diseases is probably only the beginning of wiping out the hard-fought public health gains of the last 150+ years. This should be gravely concerning to any individuals and institutions concerned with workers and citizens rights.

This shift is likely to impact existing eradication and elimination efforts. Will the final pushes be made to complete the various global eradication campaigns listed above? That may necessitate some serious effort involving NPIs and active public health measures, but how much appetite is there for such things after they have been now taken out of the toolkit for SARS-CoV-2?

We can also expect previously forgotten diseases to return where they have successfully been locally eradicated. We have to always remember that the diseases that we now control with universal childhood vaccinations have not been globally eradicated – they have disappeared from our lives because vaccination rates are high enough to maintain society as a whole above the disease elimination threshold, but were vaccination rates to slip, those diseases, such as measles, will return with a vengeance.

The anti-vaccine movement was already a serious problem prior to COVID-19, but it was given a gigantic boost with the ill-advised vaccine-only COVID-19 strategy. Governments and their nominal expert advisers oversold the effectiveness of imperfect first generation COVID-vaccines, and simultaneously minimized the harms of SARS-CoV-2, creating a reality gap which gave anti-vaccine rhetoric space to thrive. This is a huge topic to be explored separately. Here it will suffice to say that while anti-vaxxers were a fringe movement prior to the pandemic, “vaccination” in general is now a toxic idea in the minds of truly significant portions of the population. A logical consequence of that shift has been a significant decrease in vaccination coverage for other diseases as well as for COVID-19.

This is even more likely given the shift in attitudes towards children. Child labour, lack of education and large families were the hallmarks of earlier eras of poor public health, which were characterized by high birth-rates and high infant mortality. Attitudes changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century and wherever health and wealth increased, child mortality fell, and the transition was made to small families. Rarity increased perceived value and children’s wellbeing became a central concern for parents and carers. The arrival of COVID-19 changed that, with some governments, advisers, advocacy groups and parents insisting that children should be exposed freely to a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus to ‘train’ their immune systems.

Infection, rather than vaccination, was the preferred route for many in public health in 2020, and still is in 2023, despite all that is known about this virus’s propensity to cause damage to all internal organs, the immune system, and the brain, and the unknowns of postinfectious sequelae. This is especially egregious in infants, whose naive immune status may be one of the reasons they have a relatively high hospitalization rate. Some commentators seek to justify the lack of protection for the elderly and vulnerable on a cost basis. We wonder what rationale can justify a lack of protection for newborns and infants, particularly in a healthcare setting, when experience of other viruses tells us children have better outcomes the later they are exposed to disease? If we are not prepared to protect children against a highly virulent SARS virus, why should we protect against others? We should expect a shift in public health attitudes, since ‘endemicity’ means there is no reason to see SARS-CoV-2 as something unique and exceptional.

We can also expect a general degradation of workplace safety protocols and standards, again reversing many decades of hard-fought gains. During COVID-19, aside from a few privileged groups who worked from home, people were herded back into their workplaces without minimal safety precautions such as providing respirators, and improving ventilation and indoor air quality, when a dangerous airborne pathogen was spreading.

Can we realistically expect existing safety precautions and regulations to survive after that precedent has been set? Can we expect public health bodies and regulatory agencies, whose job it is to enforce these standards, to fight for workplace safety given what they did during the pandemic? It is highly doubtful. After all, they stubbornly refused to admit that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne (even to this very day in fact – the World Health Organization’s infamous “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne” Tweet from March 28 2020 is still up in its original form), and it is not hard to see why – implementing airborne precautions in workplaces, schools, and other public spaces would have resulted in a cost to employers and governments; a cost they could avoid if they simply denied they needed to take such precautions. But short-term thinking has resulted in long-term costs to those same organizations, through the staffing crisis, and the still-rising disability tsunami. The same principle applies to all other existing safety measures.

Worse, we have now entered the phase of abandoning respiratory precautions even in hospitals. The natural consequence of unmasked staff and patients, even those known to be SARS-CoV-2 positive, freely mixing in overcrowded hospitals is the rampant spread of hospital-acquired infections, often among some of the most vulnerable demographics. This was previously thought to be a bad thing. And what of the future? If nobody is taking any measures to stop one particular highly dangerous nosocomial infection, why would anyone care about all the others, which are often no easier to prevent? And if standards of care have slipped to such a low point with respect to COVID-19, why would anyone bother providing the best care possible for other conditions? This is a one-way feed-forward healthcare system degradation that will only continue.

Finally, the very intellectual foundations of the achievements of the last century and a half are eroding. Chief among these is the germ theory of infectious disease, by which transmission chains can be isolated and broken. The alternative theory, of spontaneous generation of pathogens, means there are no chains to be broken. Today, we are told that it is impossible to contain SARS-CoV-2 and we have to "just live with it,” as if germ theory no longer holds. The argument that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to wildlife means that containment is impossible illustrates these contradictions further – SARS-CoV-2 came from wildlife, as did all other zoonotic infections, so how does the virus spilling back to wildlife change anything in terms of public health protocol? But if one has decided that from here on there will be no effort to break transmission chains because it is too costly for the privileged few in society, then excuses for that laissez-faire attitude will always be found.

And that does not bode well for the near- and medium-term future of the human species on planet Earth.

(Follow the link for more than 100 references and sources)

[creativeera]

The Europe Animal Healthcare Market is in trends by increasing pet adoption amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Animal healthcare deals with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases that affect animals. Pet owners in Europe are increasingly spending on quality animal feed, nutrition and healthcare products to ensure the overall well-being of their pets. Veterinary care services for pets include vaccination, surgeries and treatment of ailments. Growing urbanization coupled with rising incomes have led to increasing pet ownership, especially dogs and cats over recent years in Europe. The bond between pets and their owners has strengthened amid the outbreak of COVID-19 as people sought companionship working from home. Key Takeaways Key players: Key players operating in the Europe Animal Healthcare are Merck & Co., Inc., Virbac, Dechra Pharmaceuticals, Vetoquinol S.A., Zoetis Inc., Ceva Santé Animale, Bayer AG, Elanco, Evonik Industries AG, Archer Daniels Midland Company, Cargill, Incorporated. Growing demand: Rising pet adoption, increasing disposable incomes, growing awareness about pet health are fueling the demand for animal healthcare products and services in Europe. Pet owners are willing to spend more on premium pet food, nutraceuticals and veterinary care. Global expansion: Leading players are expanding their manufacturing facilities and distribution networks across major countries in Europe Animal Healthcare Market Demand. Companies are also focusing on development of novel drugs and therapeutic areas through collaborative research efforts. Market key trends: One of the key trends gaining traction in the Europe Animal Healthcare market is customized pet foods. Manufacturers are focusing on development of customized dietary solutions tailored to pet's breed, size, age, and medical conditions. Companies are incorporating advanced nutritional analysis and customized recipes for pet foods to cater to individual pet requirements.

Porter's Analysis Threat of new entrants: Low barriers to entry due to requirements and regulations. Bargaining power of buyers: Large buyer base leads to more negotiating power. Bargaining power of suppliers: Few suppliers with differentiated products have more influence. Threat of new substitutes: Presence of alternative treatments poses threat of substitution. Competitive rivalry: Intense completion between global and regional players to gain market share. Geographical regions where the Europe animal healthcare market is concentrated in terms of value include Germany, France, UK, Italy and Spain. These countries collectively accounted for over 60% of market share in 2024 owing to high pet ownership and rising animal welfare expenditure. The fastest growing region for the Europe animal healthcare market is Eastern Europe. Countries like Russia, Poland, Romania etc. are witnessing double digit growth due to growing livestock industry, increasing meat consumption and rising awareness about animal health. This growth is further aided by expanding veterinary services and growing pet adoption in urban areas.

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Priya Pandey is a dynamic and passionate editor with over three years of expertise in content editing and proofreading. Holding a bachelor's degree in biotechnology, Priya has a knack for making the content engaging. Her diverse portfolio includes editing documents across different industries, including food and beverages, information and technology, healthcare, chemical and materials, etc. Priya's meticulous attention to detail and commitment to excellence make her an invaluable asset in the world of content creation and refinement.

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[pb-dot]

Author Ask Tag

If you know me and my presence here, it should come as no surprise that I love talking about the stuff I write. So, when @mthollowell-writes tagged me in this thing, I wasn't going to say no.

1 What is the main lesson of your story (e.g. kindness, diversity, anti-war), and why did you choose it?

The Clockwork Boy and the series I hope it becomes is a story about unity and collaboration. The forces arrayed against them are considerable, but since both The Spire and The Clockmen are filled with inveterate backstabbers, the scrappy underdog of Jake, Adrian, and The Northwest has a fighting chance, not only for survival but the future of the city. My "thesis" if you will is that The Spire and The Clockmen are doomed to fail in the long run because the glue that holds them together is that the participants can each profit from each other's strength. This means that nobody has an incentive to show weakness, lest they be judged unworthy of the group, and nothing resembling mutual trust can develop. The Northwest and the rest of "team hero," on the other side, rely on each other to compensate for their weaknesses and vulnerabilities which inherently builds trust.

This theme emerged from the place I held in life when writing the initial draft, I believe. I was, and am in many ways still in a fairly vulnerable spot in my life. I am seeking treatment for both physical and mental health problems as well as employment despite challenges in the above-mentioned departments. It's easy for me to feel self-conscious about having to rely on external factors such as doctors and other healthcare professionals, but I have found much solace in the works of the effervescent Philosophy Tube, and one of her older videos, in particular, have shaped this insecurity into some neat thematic stuff in the book I write, for which I am eternally grateful.

2 What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding (like real-life cultures, animals, famous media, websites, etc.)?

A lot of the world of Hearts In Clockwork has been inspired by colonial-era Europe, England in particular, but I am aiming more for a wider pastiche than a direct reference. There's also some bits of steam punk aesthetics to the setting, but due to severe disruptions of the coal supply, much of the borderline impossible steam-powered technology is mostly for show.

3 What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, help readers grow as a person?

My main characters are still kind of figuring out their place in the world around them per the last book, so their needs are very personal. Jake wants to belong somewhere and 13/Adrian wants to know who he was before becoming a Clockman, or barring that what kind of a person he wants to be now that he is free. It is my goal to transition these goals into grander goals as the series progresses, as Jake is motivated to oppose The Spire and The Clockmen by his bonds with Adrian and The Northwest, and Adrian attempts to end the conflict brewing in the setting as nonviolently as possible in direct defiance of his original design. I base this progression on the idea that problems, even some problems viewed as personal, might be best solved by trying to change the world in some way. It is a counterargument to the "Clean Your Room"-crowd, I suppose.

4 How many chapters is your story going to have?

The Clockwork Boy currently sits on 24 chapters and one epilog chapter. It's approximately where I want it lengthwise.

5 Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

It is original content. My goal is to get it published, preferrably through a smaller indie outfit.

6 When and why did you start writing?

This question is a bit ambigious. If it's when I started writing period, I've done it as long as I've known how to. My motivations have never been entirely clear to me, but I do believe it comes from a need to be seen and heard in some way.

As far as when and why I got into The Clockwork Boy, I started that during National Novel Writing Month in November 2022. My initial motivation was frankly that I hadn't found any genre novels with intrigue, politics and a gay romance in a while, so I decided to try writing one myself.

7 Do you have any words of engagement for fellow writers of Writeblr? What other writers of Tumblr do you follow?

Like Share And Subscribe Seriously though, this is the most useful piece of advice I've ever gotten so I'm going to pass it along:

Your Writing Is Probably Fine, you've just been staring at it for Too Long.

as well as

If it doesn't Feel Like A Book that's just because you recognize that you wrote it. Other readers will not have that problem.

As for my Pound of Tags: @covenscribe, @stesierra, @leisoree, @hollyannewrites @ettawritesnstudies

[hot-soop]

about me: tag game

tysm for the tag @ugh-yoongi ily dearly

name! — bee

number of siblings! — one younger brother (do i have big sister energy? idk)

number of pets! — none currently :') but have had a lot over the years - 5 horses, 2 cats, 3 dogs, 2 gerbils, 1 hamster, a few goldfish, and the most evil rabbit that has ever existed. my last cat ralph passed away in 2022 at the age of 18, he was the best <3

my kids have been after a cat and a dog since ralph passed, so maybe next year after ateez tour europe

favorite color! — most shades of green, blues, some reds

favorite author! — idk that i have a favourite bc it's been a while since i've read anything published, but i did like terry pratchett's nonsense way back when. i also really liked sally rooney's normal people, even though the characters are enormously toxic and it's not exactly a love story to be revered.

favorite song! - again, no favourite as such. lately i've had silver light - ateez, nerves - dpr ian, and disloyal order of water buffaloes - fall out boy on repeat.

hobbies! — imagining myself writing, astrology, tarot, kpop fanart, animal crossing (i can't believe this capitalist hellscape game got me in a chokehold), looking at park seonghwa and wondering how he exists like that. i live near some big (for england) lakes and mountains so in the summer we do a lot of hiking and kayaking, photocard collecting (not a serious collector but i have a bunch), got back into baking recently and two weeks ago i made the best chocolate & cherry hot cross buns i fear i may never get them as good as the first try

favorite holiday! — christmas!

fun fact / something i’d enjoy sharing! — the best thing i ever did for myself was quit the healthcare industry and start my own shop, bc designing my little kpop pins, tattoos and washi tapes and photocard holders has given me my life back. i might occasionally reply to an email at 2am but it's so much easier than 16 hour shifts on my feet

if you're curious about anything, feel free to send an ask

tagging: i came SO late to this so i'm sorry idk who's already done this, but if you see it please consider yourself tagged <3

[frontierallergy]

Unveiling the Enigma of Alpha-Gal: Unanticipated Allergies When Ticks Transform Meat into a Health Risk

In a culinary landscape where new flavors and dishes often bring joy, imagine savoring a delectable steak or burger only to face an unexpected allergic reaction, turning the simple act of consuming meat into a potential health concern. This perplexing phenomenon is none other than the Alpha-Gal tick meat allergy, a genuine mystery that has captivated scientists and garnered attention from the medical community in recent times. Join us as we delve into the captivating realm of Alpha-Gal and unravel the intricate connections between ticks, meat, and the human immune system.

Understanding the Alpha-Gal Relationship

Alpha-Gal, short for "alpha-galactose," is a carbohydrate molecule naturally found in the organs of many non-primate animals. Remarkably absent in humans and other primates, it becomes an alien substance triggering immune responses under specific circumstances, such as tick bites. Research indicates that individuals bitten by ticks are more likely to develop red meat allergies, suggesting a correlation between tick exposure and altered immune reactions to alpha-gal.

The link between Alpha-Gal and ticks was established in the early 2000s in regions like the southeastern United States and parts of Europe, where ticks like the Lone Star ticks are prevalent. When these ticks bite humans, alpha-gal molecules enter the bloodstream, prompting the immune system to produce antibodies against them.

Mechanism of Allergic Reaction

The Alpha-Gal allergy unfolds in a series of steps:

Tick Bite: Alpha-Gal-carrying ticks acquire alpha-gal molecules from the blood of the animals they feed on, incorporating them into their saliva. When these ticks bite humans, the saliva containing alpha-gal is introduced into the bloodstream.

Immune Response: The immune system recognizes alpha-gal as foreign and generates antibodies, specifically Immunoglobulin E (IgE).

Delayed Reaction: Unlike immediate allergic reactions, Alpha-Gal allergies take time to develop. Symptoms typically surface 3 to 6 hours after consuming red meat, complicating the identification of the trigger.

Diagnosis and Symptoms

Diagnosing Alpha-Gal allergies poses challenges due to delayed symptoms and the need for specialized blood tests. Symptoms may include hives, itching, swelling, gastrointestinal discomfort, and in severe cases, anaphylaxis. Timely and accurate diagnosis is crucial given the potential seriousness of reactions associated with this allergy.

Managing Alpha-Gal Allergies

Living with an Alpha-Gal allergy requires careful lifestyle adjustments:

Elimination of Trigger Foods: Avoiding foods containing alpha-galactose, such as red meat and gelatin-containing products, is essential.

Tick Control: Minimize tick exposure through protective clothing, tick repellents, and avoiding tick habitats.

Educating Healthcare Professionals: Raise awareness among healthcare professionals about the unique features and testing requirements for Alpha-Gal allergies.

Emergency Planning: Individuals prone to severe allergic reactions should carry an EpiPen and know how to use it in case of emergencies.

Future Research Directions

Ongoing scientific research aims to enhance our understanding of Alpha-Gal allergies, exploring new diagnostic procedures, desensitization medications, and strategies to reduce tick populations.In conclusion, the investigation into Alpha-Gal allergies uncovers a fascinating connection between ticks, meat, and allergic reactions. If you suspect Alpha-Gal-related allergic symptoms, do not hesitate to reach out. Your well-being is our priority, and we are here to assist you.

[m4zed]

NPCS : Ariadne's (adoptive) parents

Aretta Chapuis (née Olowe)

Aretta is born into a family of second generation immigrants from Nigeria in Liverpool. In her youth she used to ride in her free time & dreamed of becoming a professional equestrian. Instead she ends up as the first in her family to go to university, attending courses for psychology and economics. After some more qualification Aretta starts working as a insurance broker, specializing in healthcare. At the age of 26 she takes a job in Manchester & this where she meets Gérard. He proposes a year into their relationship and for a while the couple lives in Manchester and Paris. They do want children, but feel no rush about it & are fine just enjoying their life together as it is. Eventually they settle in a beautiful little house in Bradford-upon-Avon, with Aretta commuting to Bath for work. At this point she's given up the thought of biological children and they decide to try adoption. This is how Ariadne comes into the picture. The 5-year-old orphan instantly wins their hearts and quickly becomes the centre of their world. Both Aretta and Gérard dedicate themselves to raising the child and surround them with unconditional love. As soon as Ariadne is old enough to understand, they also explain the adoption to them, so they have been aware of that early on. Knowing how it feels to be disconnected from your heritage, Aretta does her best to support Ariadne in that regard and they even make a trip to China together. When Ariadne comes out as a lesbian to their parents, it gets the ball rolling for Aretta & educating herself leads to acknowledging her own bisexuality. With her child studying abroad, Aretta also discovers painting as a hobby.

Gérard Chapuis

Gérard hails from a small village in Southern France, where he grew up with four siblings & surrounded by cows. While he loves nature, he dreams of getting out & making his own way. That eventually brings him to Marseilles & he starts an apprenticeship with a carpenter. If it teaches him anything it's that Gérard enjoys being on the move, getting his own hands dirty. During that time he gets his first camera & it turns into a full obsession. Enough for him to quit carpentry & apply for jobs in photography (in the meantime depending on retail jobs to support himself). It takes a few years & more training, but slowly Gérard starts building a name for himself & enjoys travelling through Europe and beyond. In Manchester he meets Aretta and they bond over their shared love for animals. After a short time, he decides to stay in England to be with her & they get married. Since he mostly works from home anyway, Gérard takes a step back when Ariadne is little & stays with them. Perhaps that established the close bond between them, because while Ariadne loves Aretta with their whole heart, Gérard holds a very special place & the two of them are very close. To this day Ariadne enjoys travelling with their father & they're very grateful for Gérard's connections in Paris that helped with flat and the university when they moved there.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I know I’ve posted links to these pages before, but not for many months, and I’m now using them again and really need to reiterate how awesome this is. Obviously, a podcast like The Bugle is going to have a fanbase full of the type of people who would go through every episode and catalogue the hell out of it. Obviously. Obviously this exists.

Both those links look like the same thing, but they’re different pages. One is a properly organized list of the first 193 episodes, going through each section of most episodes and noting what was discussed, and listing instances of the various running jokes, motifs, features, recurring characters, etc. The other is a disorganized mess that, for each episode up to 146, lists some key phrases and topics. It is so helpful. It looks like a mess at first, but it’s amazingly helpful that if I vaguely remember some joke or other that was made in any of the first 193 episodes, I can CTRL+F for it on that page, and I will probably find it. Not quite 100% of the time, obviously, but this page has come through for me more often than it’s let me down, when I recall some offhand comment Andy Zaltzman made sometime around 2009 but I don’t know its context, and I check this page for it, and there it is. It’s fucking great.

It’s the sort of thing I’d make, but I don’t have to, because it turns out I fit so perfectly into the demographic of Bugle fans (autistic, the word I’m looking for is autistic) that the other ones are just like me and they beat me to it. It was incredibly helpful when I was making Bugle compilations last year, which I maintain were an excellent use of my time, even the one the ended up being the length, and arguably breadth, of a feature film (it’s the one about John Oliver and Sarah Palin, it was supposed to just be a short audio compilation but it’s 74 minutes long and features enough photos and video to count as a documentary).

Aside from how helpful they are, it’s just really entertaining to read the thrown-together lists of “things that happened in this episode” out of context. The properly organized list is great, but the one that’s an unformatted mess has a charm I hugely enjoy, and creates some amusing out-of-context summaries. To grab a few at random:

37 21/7/08 Obama an the media Dr love/The Slaying of Nigel Obama/VP ideas/Europe loves Obama/ Andy describes badgers/Crazy Belgians/Stalin&Rasputin leading best Russian pole/Warmonger cowboy fancy drees/Batgirl is jewish/HFH: Gulveg the Norse giantess

56 15/12/08 Riggles leaving do/lettuce or fairy wings/Blagoiavic corruption/Obamas 1stspeech Old McDonald/Michael stone claims his attack was art/OJ giving birth/Neither Obama or McCain are eligable to be president/Canada in shambles/Plans to cut down smoking/Names for Andys child/British sportsman of the year/Scottish tennis, "Foot fault f*ck you"

109 29/3/10 US healthcare bill a big fucking deal/Death threat on Twitter/Bullet falls through Eric Cantors window/US Israel settlements talk/British MP's cabs for hire/The American on healthcare & National treasure, thinks he's on the radio, guns in Starbucks/Flipping Vanilla Ice the Bird/Roll call of donors

115 17/5/10 Britains Coalition Gov./UK has only 1 more Female MP than Afganistan/Berlusconnis divorce terms/Grecian economy is fucked/Phillies fan tazered

127 20/9/10 Pope in UK/$80 million to keep tigers alive $50 million given/Tea Pary wins midterms/Christine O'Donnel... hates masturbation, is a witch, cross breeding animals/Sport of shinti

131 18/10/10 John beats Riggle at fantasy football, Riggle threatens to kill him/Sporty Pussycat Doll/Bugles 3rd Birthday/Andy is drunk/Chilean miners get out/Someone throws book at Obama

Fucking excellent. Someone scribbled all these notes and put them on the internet so that ten years later I could easily look up in what episode American comedian Rob Riggle threatened to murder John Oliver. Thank you for your service, whoever made this. This is what the internet should be for.

[xtruss]

The Palau de la Música Catalana is considered chief among Domènech i Montaner’s masterpieces. Photograph: Stefano Politi Markovina/Alamy

Barcelona’s ‘Other’ Great Architect: Five of His Finest Buildings

Catalonia’s design gems don’t begin and end with Gaudí. The works of Lluís Domènech i Montaner deserve a closer look on the centenary of his death

— Stephen Burgen | Wednesday 8 February 2023

Barcelona is justly renowned for its architecture but there’s a lot more to it than Gaudí and the still unfinished Sagrada Familia. This year Catalonia is celebrating the centenary of the death of Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1849-1923), one of Gaudí’s contemporaries and a leading light in the Catalan modernisme movement,

Over the course of the year there will be talks, videos and conferences celebrating the work of this prolific architect, as well as a route taking in some of his 26 buildings, 11 of which are in Barcelona. Domènech, who was prominent in the Catalan cultural revival known as the renaixença, combined modern techniques such as steel-framing with nostalgic and often romantic concepts of Spanish and Catalan culture. Ornamental ironwork, ceramics and stained glass characterise his lavishly decorated buildings.

Here’s are five of the architect’s most emblematic buildings.

Castell dels Tres Dragons, Barcelona

Castell dels Tres Dragons incorporates medieval influences. Photograph: Alamy

Standing in the north-west corner of the Parc de la Ciutadella, the Castell dels Tres Dragons was built in 1888 as a cafe and restaurant for the Universal Exposition. Although an early work, Domènech had already developed his distinctive style of exposed brickwork and iron structures. There are medieval references as well as a nod to the Spanish-Arab mudejar style, with heraldic motifs and images of plants and animals. The capitals and columns in the cafe are based on the 12th-century synagogue in Toledo. The Castell had a later life as the city’s natural history museum but that has now moved and the building is being restored.

Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona

The concert hall’s design has Spanish and Arabic elements. Photograph: Brian Jannsen/Alamy

The steel-framed concert hall built for the Orfeó Català choir in 1908 was funded by public donations and is generally seen as Domènech’s most complete masterpiece. As with the Castell, the facade consists of exposed brick and iron and decorative mosaics with elements of Spanish and Arabic architecture. Inside, the dominant element is stained glass. Even the balusters on the stairway are glass and the concert hall itself is walled with glass so that in summer recitals begin in daylight, giving the sensation of listening to music in a garden. The ceiling supports a gigantic sun-like skylight while the semi-circular stage is lined with carvings of 18 “muses”. The acoustics are surprisingly good, given the amount of glass, and to fully appreciate the Palau, go to a concert. There are classical, jazz and flamenco concerts all year round. Guided tours are also available.

Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona

A hospital that’s an ‘exuberant celebration of ceramics, glass and ornamentation’. Photograph: Alamy

Work on what is Europe’s largest art nouveau building began in 1901 but wasn’t completed until 1930, after the architect’s death. Facing the sea so that patients might benefit from breezes off the Mediterranean, the building incorporates what were then modern ideas about healthcare and hygiene, with ample ventilation and open spaces. It comprises a series of interconnected buildings, each catering to different medical conditions. The curved, tiled surfaces of the operating theatres, with no crevices where dirt can gather, reflect the growing awareness of the need for a sterile environment. The main administration building is an exuberant celebration of ceramics, glass and ornamentation, unlike any hospital designed before or since. Sant Pau continued to serve as one of the city’s principal hospitals until 2009. Along with the Palau de la Música Catalana, it was declared a Unesco heritage site in 1997.

Casa Navàs and Pere Mata, Reus

The Institut Pere Mata is a psychiatric hospital in Reus. Photograph: Cavan Images/Alamy

Reus, one hour and 20 minutes south of Barcelona by train, is now a bit of backwater but was once a wealthy textile town. The house was commissioned by Joaquim Navàs Padró, a textile merchant, and Domènech began work on it in 1901 in conjunction with the interior designer Gaspar Homar. Between them, they created an intricately decorated house rich in detail and where once again stained glass and ceramics are the protagonists. Despite being damaged during the Spanish civil war, it contains all the original furniture. While in Reus you might visit Domènech’s other buildings there, notably the Pere Mata psychiatric hospital.

Casa Museu Domènech, Canet de Mar

Domènech designed some of his best known buildings in his Canet de Mar studio. Photograph: Campillo Rafael/Alamy

Domènech built this house to accommodate his large family and he designed some of his most famous work in the building’s studio. Since 1998 it’s been a museum where, as well as touring the building, there are displays illustrating his work not just as an architect but as a writer. Domènech also built the town’s Ateneu (cultural centre), which is similar in design to the Castell dels Tres Dragons. The museum organises a tour of his and the work of other modernista architects in the town, which is an hour’s train journey north of Barcelona.