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gwern comments on Is latent Toxoplasmosis worth doing something about? - Less Wrong Discussion

23 Post author: jsalvatier 17 November 2011 05:04PM

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Tags: health

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Comment author: roystgnr 18 November 2011 04:46:16AM 6 points [-]

Car crashes are still responsible for a million deaths and something like a trillion dollars in damages every year. Reducing the number of people on the road with slowed reaction times would only have to make a very small relative dent in that to have a very large absolute effect.

On the other hand, toxoplasmosis treatment is almost certainly not the low-hanging fruit here - better cultural attitudes and vehicle safety features already make driving much safer in some places than in others, and self-driving cars may make the very concept of driver reaction time moot in a generation.

Comment author: gwern 18 November 2011 02:50:24PM 6 points [-]

Treatment on a large scale presents different concerns than on a small scale.

  1. Specifically, what about reinfection? AFAIK human-to-human infection is not how toxo is spreading, and so a mass treatment plan would not affect the reinfection rate or give people any sort of immunity. So either the benefit will be temporary as people are reinfected by their cats, or this is a perpetual ongoing public health commitment on the scale of vaccinations.
  2. And the treatment uses antibiotics. I suspect more lives are saved every year by antibiotics than are taken by cars, many more lives. (IIRC, there's around 50k car deaths annually in the US; I'd guess there are way more infections cured than that.) What's the risk of developing antibiotic resistance in toxo or anything people might have? (We're not risking any of the last-resort antibiotics are we?) And antibiotics aren't perfect, they can have serious side-effects.

So, I'm saying this is very far from a no-brainer on an individual basis, and it's even worse on a population level.

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