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   stingray (2023 edition) (stingray@spinster.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 14-Oct-2023 06:42:07 JST stingray (2023 edition)

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   • LadyMont
   @LadyMont I want to believe that this is why there are so many medieval drawings showing people fighting snails, but it probably isn't.
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     LadyMont (ladymont@spinster.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 14-Oct-2023 06:42:08 JST LadyMont
     Happy Friday the 13th, here's a nice horror story for y'all.
     
     Freshwater snails carry a parasitic disease called schistosomiasis, which infects nearly 250 million people, mostly in Asia, Africa and South America.
     
     “It's one of the world's most deadly parasites,” says Susanne Sokolow, a disease ecologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station.
     
     “You do contract it from just wading, swimming, entering the water in any way, and the parasites basically exit the snails into the water and seek you. And they penetrate right through your skin, migrate through your body, end up in your blood vessels where they can live for many years even decades. It's not the worms that actually cause disease to people, it's the eggs. And those eggs have sharp barbs because they eventually need to make it back out of the human body and back into the water and find that there are snails that they need to complete their reproduction cycle. And so those eggs can lodge in different tissues and cause severe symptoms ranging from anemia and fatigue, all the way to various severe symptoms, even death in about 10 percent of chronic cases.”
     
     https://theworld.org/stories/2016-08-13/why-snails-are-one-worlds-deadliest-creatures