So you can be literally infected with vegetarianism now?
(brb writing a novel about a secret agent trying to stop a terrorist vegan organization from putting this in the water supply of new york city.)
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Not true vegetarianism; just can't eat mammal-derived meat. Other animals are still fair game. (pun not intended, but I'll take it)
Primates are also fair game.
Chicken might be an easier obtainable answer.
Primates are mammals...
> Primates are mammals...
That don't produce alpha-gal, the glycan that generates this allergy.
If humans produced alpha-gal, negative selection would typically remove it as a possible ligand, and this would rarely happen.
Ah, gotcha. Well I won't be eating any primates, but that's interesting to know.
Biology is such a fascinating field.
You've got bizarre disease states, immunobiology (a vast field in its own right - B cells, immunoglobulins, antigens, amplification, negative selection, etc.), evolution, and even ecology.
Just in this one problem.
Yep - this happened to a family member about 9 months ago.
Wasn't as straight forward as you might think to diagnose.
This seems to be the story with a lot of tick related illness. People come down with some random illness and they see doctor after doctor who runs a battery of tests that yield no results. Finally someone decides to run the test for Lyme Disease and lo and behold the results come back positive. Kris Kristofferson is a prime example. His doctors thought his memory loss was due to dementia, until a someone finally decided to test for Lyme Disease.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed...
A childhood friend of my sister was always shorter and skinnier than her classmates, didn't really hit the same kind of growth spurt as they did. I think she also had some indicators of ADHD, and she did run out of energy rather quickly.
It turned out after quite some time that she had lyme disease, and once that was treated, she basically hit her growth spurt with back interest. It was honestly surprisingly how much of a change it made. She grew much taller, and now has a very active career as a musician and social activist, barely ever sitting still for very long.
This was apparently one of the story points in Fish to Mars by Peter Watts ( https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8217 ).
That is... a surprisingly interesting idea. Maybe swap terrorists for a certain nationalist government aligned with a certain vegetarian-leaning religion?
Don't have a dog in this race, but doesn't that certain vegetarian-leaning religion also prohibit violence against human beings? How do the terrorists square such contradictions in their mind? And is that one of the many mysteries driving the narrative in GP's novel forward?
You'll not be surprised to hear that religions all have "national security exceptions" to their non-violence clauses. I offer as evidence: all the crazy religiously motivated violence perpetuated by any long living religions (the truly peaceful ones being beaten to death long ago).
Is the sequel to that novel a story about women taking over the tech sector