#benefits of getting vaccinated

[reportwire]

About COVID-19 Vaccines

What you need to know about vaccines, including frequently asked questions and benefits of getting vaccinated. Source link

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#benefits of getting vaccinated #Coronavirus [CoV] #FAQs #frequently asked questions #how vaccines are made #key facts about vaccines #questions about vaccines #vaccination data #vaccine data

[sarasa-cat]

Have been feeling low-key under the weather for the past couple of days. More mild-to-moderate asthmatic than usual, too congested with thick gunk. Tired from a couple of flights of stairs. Needing lots of rest breaks. Steadily poorer performance in 5k times and stats (via my sports watch- numbers falling off a cliff with yesterday being so pathetic I gave up after 3.8k).

Today I didn’t want to get out of bed at all. Cold sore on my inner lip and very annoyed throat.

But eventually I did get up bc lunch smelled yummy and lured me down the stairs but work-reading is just ugh on my brain.

And then my phone notified me, via my state government, that 5 days ago I have been exposed to Covid (anonymized reporting with phone app). State gov pushed lots of useful info to my phone on what to do and what is available in my local area.

I have some old tests in a cupboard that the state provided for free last year. Will eventually give one of those a try and then off to the local testing center once I muster the energy.

No idea where I was that caused an exposure match and I tend to be ultra cautious but from what I think I have read via all those old public health/emergency planning/biostats and mathematical modeling lists that I never unsubscribed all these years later, this new variant is super contagious.

My neck aches.

Need to finish my coffee before I attempt to make sense of an at-home test.

Believe it or not, I have never done an at home test.

(Was tested a few times in 2021 at testing centers when ppl from my circle of local ppl texted/called me to say they were positive and/or had been exposed— all came back negative and I was fine too).

Whatever this is, hopefully it just remains low key annoying for a few days and only continues to make me want to wear insulated/fleece-lined yoga pants and curl up under a blanket with a hot mug of something by a window while watching the neighborhood do its thing (and my cat sits with me, watching birds and squirrels).

#i have had n-zillion vaccines #the most recent just a couple of months ago #like mid or late October ? #and lots of useful drugs at home #plus an infinite prednisone step down Rx #if I get desperately bad #plus the state gov send me test-n-treat info #so we’re good here #the benefits of a blue state that is trying #despite all of its problems

[official-rolli-und-rita]

it turns out that vaccines actually cause you to kiss your mutuals on the head and wrap them in a warm blanket

#another great benefit to getting vaccinated #mutuals

[evilgayfish]

feeling that level of work burnout where not only am i burnt out on my current job, i can’t imagine any job in any industry being any better.

#gay and obscure nonsense #still don't have enough vets to meet client demands still training an idiot who can't take criticism #still the only para staff who's consistently on time #now with the added benefit of being the only credentialed tech so i have to take as many tech appointments as possible #to spare our one (1) remaining vet from having to do so many vaccines she doesn't have time for anything else #and now with one fewer competent coworker :( #we're hiring and our candidates seem promising but our training 'process' is an absolute free for all mess #in which trainees are scheduled as if they're already fully trained so we don't have enough people to train them AND do regular work #so it's gonna get worse before it gets better lmao #and god knows how long it'll be before we can get another vet #corporate is trying to get us one ASAP but there's a serious nationwide shortage of vets in general #especially vets who want to work in a clinical setting #only light in the dark is that our new regional management seems to be actually good and supportive for once #we met with them yesterday and i didn't feel dead inside afterwards which is very new #when i started it was the very beginning of the pandemic so my only experience with regional management was zoom calls #in which they told us to work harder while they sat on their couches at home completely safe from covid #while we risked our actual literal lives for this shit #then those people got fired and we kinda just never heard from the people who replaced them #so this is definitely an improvement. let's hope it lasts lmao

[headspace-hotel]

Also on topic of Consent: whenever somebody says "Kids should have bodily autonomy!" some guy always is like "You are too unrealistic. What will you do when a kid is seeing the doctor and doesn't want to get a shot? Would you just let them refuse the shot?"

Yeah I probably would. You're straight up asking the wrong person if you want the nice normal answer here. Doctors and nurses forcibly doing (relatively routine) things to my body against my protests when I was a small kid fucked me up so bad that as an adult anything medical related is a huge trigger for me, I've had persistent intrusive thoughts and recurring nightmares about medical procedures, and I can't have even the most basic tests and health checks done on top of it.

I hate talking about it because I can't get comfortable calling it "trauma" and I don't have any other words that are useful, but it's made my life so much harder and really scary since if I start having a weird symptom, there's nothing I can move myself to do about it.

I figured out a loophole where going to a pharmacy instead of a doctor's office for vaccines reduces some of the stress, but I was still in stress and misery for days before I went to get my tetanus shot. The repulsion is so intense it feels like I literally don't have control over myself, it feels like I can't make appointments or plans about such things out of my own free will, and so every year I have guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt about how I should get the flu shot, and it does nothing but ineffectually hurt me.

Vaccines save lives and all that, but when it comes right down to it, I don't think it's actually a net benefit to public health to give any percentage of kids lifelong psychological scars so deep and painful they're almost completely barred from accessing health care as adults.

I know I'm not the only one, far from it.

#medical tw #consent #bodily autonomy #needles tw #doctors tw

[jessepinwheel]

there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine--you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

#I thought about this a lot when I was writing dielectric #runner too come to think of it #I write about this kind of thing a lot #because it's about being pushed to the absolute limits #to the point where you can't even ask what you're willing to do #you don't have a choice in the matter you just have to live with it #when you have exactly one goal #you can basically do anything #so long as you don't care about what happens afterwards #or what the price might be #it's a scary thing to think about

[theofreakingbell]

I feel like this needs to be said bc I haven't yet seen anyone on here talk about it:

if you get Long COVID (which can happen to anyone who gets infected including if ur vaccinated, it's just rarer) and there is no record of you having COVID it can interfere with you getting any disability benefits for it if it disables you. if you think you may have COVID you need to test, and keep a record of the positive test if you do test positive. take a picture or video of it or something. you do not want to be up against the benefits system without evidence you had COVID.

source is this article which is also a good overview of many of the issues Long Covid survivors are having to face:

#covid #long covid #disability #us politics #covid is not over #someone shared this on twitter and I rarely do this but I need ppl to know

[jaycutler218]

#flu vaccine #flu shots #flu shot benefits #flu vaccine cost #Who should get a flu vaccine this season #Who Should Not Receive a Flu Shot

[hello-nichya-here]

Did Sia insult topic of autism somehow?

Oh honey, it's sooooooooo much worse than that.

Sia wanted to make a movie about an autistic girl that manages to connect to people/feel safe and confident through music. So far, nothing outrageous, just a simple concept that would obviously put Sia's music front and center while doing something nice and educating people on autism.

There was controversy about her not casting an autistic actress as it would have been nice representation, but she could have totally gotten away with that since, come on, hollywood hasn't even figured out Rain Man isn't exactly true to life, they're not ready to have an autistic person playing an autistic character. Baby steps.

The real problem started when Sia started promoting the "charity/support group" that was helping "educate" her on the topic to make the movie. The "charity" in question was Autism Speaks - which is absolutely HATED by the autistic community for things like:

1 - Spreading the myth that autism is a mental illness that one can develop/catch like the freaking flue and potentially be cured of, instead of a neurotype, aka something starts in the woomb and cannot be "cured" because to do that you'd need to replace someone's entire nervous system, which is impossible.

2 - Using that myth to get outrageous amounts of money from people so they "search for a cure" - that doesn't exist and will never exist because curing autism is biologically impossible, AND despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of autistic people don't even want to be "cured" (plus, since said "cure" would essentially mean giving the person a new brain, it leads to the question of "Would I even be the same person, or would that just kill and replace me?")

3 - Using the myth of "We don't know what causes autism" (we do, it's genetic) to, of course, get MORE money from people so they can "do research to find the missing puzzle piece" (if you ever see autistic people complaining about a puzzle piece being used to represent the condition, that's why, it was started by Autism Speak's massive disinformation campains).

4 - Falsely "confirming" things like soy milk cause autism with one of the world's most ridiculous "research", losing only to "vaccines totally make kids autistic, buy MY vaccine instead, guys, I am totally not an unbelievably biased person, it's ALL the other doctors/scientists lying to you. GIVE ME MONEY!"

5 - Pushing the narrative of "autism is inherently a tragedy" to distract from the fact that all the money they waste on stupid shit could be used to help autistic people and their families. Instead, they focus on creating more and more panic, making parents in particular despair even more - to the point that one of their "awareness videos" includes a mother talking about how she wants to murder her autistic daughter and then kill herself... while sitting right next to said daughter.

6 - Promoting ABA "therapy" - which was created by the same guy responsible for the attrocity that is gay conversion "therapy." Both have led to unbelievably high rates of confirmed PTSD and suicidal ideation in patients (victims), and ABA in particular has been compared to literal dog training. Very fitting since it was created by a guy who famously did not believe autistic people truly counted as thinking, feeling human beings, and said as much several times. Despite that, it is still praised by some utter bastards because "it makes the patients act less autistic when they're not crying in the corner or trying to jump out a window"

So yeah, working with these guys is a genuinely horrible thing to do since they're basically a scam/hate group pretending to be a charity - and people were STILL willing to give Sia the benefit of the doubt, since Autism Speak uses all their resources to make sure they're the first thing people see when looking up how to help autistic people.

Lots of Sia's fans, both autistic and allistic, warned her repeatedly, politely, that she needed to supporting them IMMEDIATELY as their goal was the exact opposite of the one she claimed to have - aka raise awareness through an accurate portrail of autism. People were even kind enough to name organizations like ASAN as replacements to help her fix any damage done to the project.

And instead of being a decent human being, Sia decided to cry on twitter about how the mean retar-I mean, autistics were bullying her even when she was so kindly using them for her vanity project.

Because yes, that's how the movie turned out. An unwatcheable piece of garbage, with the autistic "character" being so fucking bad even the people who actively use "autistic" as insulted being offended on our behalf - and of course, she was used just a prop to show how awesome Sia's character was.

Seriously, it was so bad the actress playing the autistic girl was sobbing in between scenes because she knew how it was horrible and she didn't want to insult anyone, but Sia is literally her godmother and helped her career by putting her in nearly all her music videos so she felt obligated to go along with it.

So yeah, fuck Sia and fuck Autism Speaks.

#asks #sia #ableism #autism speaks #actually autistic #aba therapy

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I think there is something particularly horrible about antivaxxers who are 30+ and absolutely 100% fully vaccinated (because their parents and grandparents lived through too much shit to turn down ways to keep their kids alive) and who have benefited from those vaccines for decades, only to turn around and deny their children those same protections and risk them getting life changing and potentially fatal illnesses that they will NEVER be impacted by as a vaccinated person.

This is in incoherent rant, I'm just extremely bitter.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - March 13, 2023

🐝 - Did you hear about the honeybee vaccine? It's creating quite the buzz! But seriously, it's a major breakthrough in the fight against American foulbrood and could save billions of bees.

1. Transgender health care is now protected in Minnesota

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order protecting and supporting access to gender-affirming health care for LGBTQ people in the state, amidst Republican-backed efforts across the country to limit transgender health care. The order upholds the essential values of One Minnesota where all people, including members of the LGBTQIA+ community, are safe, celebrated, and able to live lives full of dignity and joy.

Numerous medical organizations have said that access to gender-affirming care is essential to the health and wellness of gender diverse people, while states like Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Florida have passed policies or laws restricting transgender health care.

2. First vaccine for honeybees could save billions

The US government has approved the world's first honeybee vaccine to fight against American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that destroys bee colonies vital for crop pollination.

Developed by biotech company Dalan Animal Health, the vaccine integrates some of the foulbrood bacteria into royal jelly, which is then fed to the queen by the worker bees, resulting in the growing bee larvae developing immunity to foulbrood. The vaccine aims to limit the damage caused by the infectious disease, for which there is currently no cure, and promote the development of vaccines for other diseases affecting bees.

3. Teens rescued after days stranded in California snowstorm: "We were already convinced we were going to die"

The recent snowstorms in California have resulted in dangerous conditions for hikers and residents in mountain communities. Two teenage hikers were rescued by the San Bernardino County sheriff's department after getting lost in the mountains for 10 days.

The boys were well-prepared for the hike but were not prepared for the massive amounts of snow that followed. They were lucky to survive, suffering from hypothermia and having to huddle together for three nights to stay warm.

Yosemite National Park has had to be closed indefinitely due to the excessive snowfall.

4. La Niña, which worsens Atlantic hurricanes and Western droughts, is gone

The La Nina weather phenomenon, which increases Atlantic hurricane activity and worsens western drought, has ended after three years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That's usually good news for the United States and other parts of the world, including drought-stricken northeast Africa, scientists said.

The globe is now in what's considered a "neutral" condition.

5. Where there's gender equality, people tend to live longer

Both women and men are likely to live longer when a country makes strides towards gender equality, according to a new global study that authors believe to be the first of its kind.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Global Public Health this week. It adds to a growing body of research showing that advances in women's rights benefit everyone. "Globally, greater gender equality is associated with longer [life expectancy] for both women and men and a widening of the gender gap in [life expectancy]," they conclude.

6. New data shows 1 in 7 cars sold globally is an EV, and combustion engine car sales have decreased by 25% since 2017

Electric vehicles are the key technology to decarbonise road transport, a sector that accounts for 16% of global emissions. Compared with 2020, sales nearly doubled to 6.6 million (a sales share of nearly 9%), bringing the total number of electric cars on the road to 16.5 million.

Sales were highest in China, where they tripled relative to 2020 to 3.3 million after several years of relative stagnation, and in Europe, where they increased by two-thirds year-on-year to 2.3 million. Together, China and Europe accounted for more than 85% of global electric car sales in 2021

7. Lastly, watch this touching moment as rescued puppy gains trust in her new owners

By the way, this is my newly started YouTube channel. Subscribe for more wholesome videos :D

---

That's it for this week. If you liked this post you can support this newsletter with a small kofi donation:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Let's carry the positivity into next week and keep spreading the good news!

#best news of last week #Youtube

[drdemonprince]

Hello! You have opened a fascinating door into kink communities I didn't even know existed. Thanks for that. I was describing some of your steamworks adventures to my partner, who works as a Disease Intervention Specialist (aka DIS, a government healthcare worker who administers free/low-cost STD testing and then attempts to track down and notify+test the recent sexual partners of any infected individuals). (He brings some INSANE stories home from work and gets to give sex ed talks at the local Christian college using a model penis that actually ejaculates--but I digress.) He was horrified by the hypothetical situation where an infected person could have blindfolded sex with an unknown number of nameless strangers. It's hard enough trying to track down partners when the patient only knew them by their Grindr username. How do you have safe sex in these situations? Some STDs can be transmitted via skin-to-skin contact even with a condom. Do venues like steamworks enforce any rules around testing/protection/etc.?

If your partner is 'horrified' by the actual sex lives of the populations he ostensibly serves I think he needs to read more from harm reductionist thinkers and queer activists from a variety of past eras and work on processing his feelings of judgement to ensure it doesn't impact his actions in that line of work.

The books and Melancholia and Moralism, Saving Our Own Lives, and Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality are good places to start.

If you're having anonymous or blindfolded sex in cruising spaces, one route of managing risks is to assume that every person there could be infected with STIs you do not have and to plan accordingly. Vaccines, condoms, PreP, testing, and education are just some of the tools at one's disposal, and one should always be cognizant of the risks that one is consenting to. Steamworks has sexual health educators and testers present within their space regularly, but they don't gatekeep based on serostatus, health status, drug regimen or use of protection -- doing so wouldn't be feasible and would be problematic on multiple grounds.

I don't believe the goal of a public health initiative or a life well lived is to eliminate all risk, or to regard the presence of any infection in any human body as unacceptable, but rather to empower people to make informed decisions about the level of risk they are comfortable confronting, or that is worth the numerous benefits to them.

Personally, I was in far greater danger when I didn't have access to such spaces. Cruising spaces make negotiating sexual consent far safer than privately dating and hooking up with someone, and Steamworks are vitally important queer community spaces, and for me are well worth the trade off. No one should have any illusions about this ever being an experience that they can eliminate all risk from, rather they should anticipate it and plan for it.

I think "safe sex" is an unhelpful framework to pursue because it is so binary and can't ever be guaranteed. What does safety mean? Which types of exposures do we consider to be "unsafe"? Am I unsafe if I encounter another person who, like me, has had a cold sore before, like 80% of the population? Or someone who has a strain of HPV I am vaccinated against? What about if I have an encounter with somebody with a cold? I'm "safer" being fucked by an HIV positive person who is undetectable and wearing a condom than I am having barrier free sex with a long term partner who cheats. I can't even know I'm taking a risk in the latter case; at Steamworks, I'm assuming my risk level to be on the high end and planning accordingly.

I understand that testing and tracing are important parts of public health for our populations. It was vitally important when monkeypox broke out. Maybe Steamworks should collect member emails and alert them if there was a reported transmission on a night that they visited. Though even then, there are some negative public health implications to dozens of people panicking. But there is no means of eliminating all risk entirely or tracing all human sexual behavior and I would be myself pretty horrified if there was.

[liberalsarecool]

Q: How do you get the most Covid hospitalizations three years into Covid?

A: Elect Republicans.

DeSantis advising against the booster is pure evil. It is a purity test for morons given by a guy who, no doubt, has the vaccine and benefits from mask/vax protocols used for everyone who comes near him.

[simonalkenmayer]

I want to show you something interesting that was done recently. Something you can show your Trump supporting relatives.

Yale did a study with death stats that shows that prior to and during the pandemic, Republicans and Democrats were largely dying at the same rate. However once vaccines came out, Democratic deaths dropped at a staggering rate, while republicans continued to (and still are) die at a much higher rate.

The study looks at “excess death”—as in deaths occurring outside the normal death rates. It does not, however, tie into COVID related death tolls via the CDC, because there’s no real way to correlate that data without knowing individual medical history. So the study approaches the idea as best as it can.

You can see from the graph that death rates seem very even among the two groups, until you get to the moment the vaccines became available.

The vertical line is vaccine roll out. Horizontal line is zero. The spikes follow alao v with the waves of spread that the CDC tracks, when variants make rounds and spread. The stats deviate from one another prior to the introduction of the vaccine, when republican disinformation began telling people to return to normal life and participate in events. However, you can see the sharp divergence clearly, when vaccines became available. They continued to diverge as months went on. Currently, Republicans have an abnormally high excess death rate, at nearly double the Democratic death toll. Even with interaction between the two groups in uncontrolled settings, Republican death rates are higher than Democratic death rates., because of vaccine efficacy. I’m sure future studies will be done to further illuminate this phenomenon, but this is an excellent first glimpse.

This is memetic selection. They chose not to be vaccinated. They chose to have less protection. And so…they cease to exist. However, because this type of selection doesn’t act as strongly on younger people who are breeding, it doesn’t drastically shift future rates of potential Republican indoctrination. It does, however, drastically change the current electorate.

Whoops.

This is the GOP platform: no plan, take away equality, bodily autonomy, privacy, social security, medical care, benefits. No rule of law, lower wages, higher aggregation of wealth in top .1%, and a destitute dependent, undereducated populace. Disposable people who die when they’re no longer useful as misinformation spreaders to facilitate their control. 

This is the consequence of compassionless governance, in mathematical, quantifiable terms.

TL;DR COVID kills more Republicans than Democrats, at rates twice as high, because the party engaged in stupid misinformation on a communicable disease for the sake of retaining power.

#covid #covid vaccine #politics #selection

[headspace-hotel]

Many people, especially USAmericans, are very resistant to knowing the plants and living according to the ways of the plants. They lash out with a mix of arrogance and fear: "Don't you know what bad things would happen if we lived a different way? There is a REASON for living this way. Would you have us go Back—backward to the time without vaccines or antibiotics????"

Ah, yes, the two immutable categories that all proposals for change fit into: Backward Change and Forward Change! Either we must invent a a futuristic, entirely new solution with SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY that further industrializes and increases the productivity of our world, or we must give up vaccines and antibiotics and become starving illiterate medieval peasants.

Every human practice anywhere on Earth that has declined, stopped, or become displaced by another practice, was clearly objectively worse than whatever replaced it. You see, the only possible reason a way of life could decline or disappear is that it sucked and had it coming anyway!!! Pre-industrial human history is worthless except as a cautionary tale about how miserable we would all be without *checks notes* factories, fossil fuels and colonialism. Obviously!

Anyway, who do you think benefits from the idea that pesticide-dependent, corporate-controlled industrialized monoculture farming liberates us all from spending our short, painful lives as filthy, miserable peasants toiling in the fields?

First of all, I think it's silly to act like farming is a uniquely awful way to live. I can't believe I have to say this, but the awful part of being a medieval peasant was the oppression and poverty, not the fact that harvesting wheat is a lot of work and cows are stinky. Same goes for farm labor in the modern USA: the bad part is that most people working farms are undocumented migrant workers that are getting treated like garbage and who can't complain about it because their boss will rat them out to ICE.

Work is just work. Any work has dignity when the people doing it are paid properly and not being abused. Abuse and human trafficking is rampant in agriculture, but industrialization and consolidation of small farms into gigantic corporate owned farms sure as hell isn't making it better.

Is working on a farm somehow more miserable than working in a factory, a fast food restaurant, or a retail store? Give me a break. "At least I'm not doing physical labor in the sun," you say, at your job where you're forced to stand on concrete for 8 hours and develop chronic pain by age 24.

When you read about small farmers going out of business because of huge corporations, none of them are going "Yay! Now that Giant Corporation has swallowed up all the farms in the area, we can all enjoy the luxurious privileges of the industrial era, like working RETAIL!" What you do see a lot of is farmers bitterly grieving the loss of their way of life.

And also, the fact is, sustainable forms of polyculture farming that create a functional ecosystem made up of many different useful and edible plants are actually way MORE efficient at producing food than a monoculture. The reason we don't do it as much, is that it can't be industrialized where everything is harvested with machines.

Some places folks are starting to get the idea and planting two crops together in alternating rows, letting the mutualistic relationship between plants boost the yields of both, but indigenous people in many parts of the world have been doing this stuff basically forever. I read about a style of agroforestry from Central America that has TWENTY crops all together on the same field.

Our modern system of farming is necessary for feeding the world? Bullshit! Our technology is very powerful and useful, but our harmful monocultures, dangerous pesticides, and wasteful usage of land and resources are making the system very inefficient and severely degrading nature's ability to provide for us.

What is needed, is a SYNTHESIS of the power and insights of technology and science, with the ancient wisdom and knowledge gained by closely and carefully observing Nature. We do not need to reject one, to embrace the other! They should be friends!

Our system thinks land is only used for one thing at a time. Even our science often thinks this way. A corn field has the purpose of producing corn, and no other purpose, so all other plants in the corn must be killed, and it must be a monoculture of only corn.

But this means that the symbiosis between different plants that help each other is destroyed, so we must pollute the earth with fertilizers that wash into bodies of water and cause eutrophication, where algae explode in number and turn the water to green goo. Nature always has variety and diversity with many plants sharing the same space. It supports much more animal life (we are animals!) this way. The Three Sisters" are the perfect example of mutualism between plants being used in an agricultural environment. The planting of corn, beans, and squash together has been traditionally used clear across the North American continent.

And in North America, the weeds we have here are mostly edible plants too. Some of them were even domesticated themselves! Imagine a garden where every weed that pops up is also an edible or otherwise useful crop, and therefore a welcomed friend! So when weeds like Amaranth and Sunflower pop up in your field, that should not be a cause for alarm, but rather the system of symbiosis working as it should.

A field of one single crop is limited in how much it can produce, because one crop fits into a single niche in what should be a whole ecosystem, and worse, it requires artificial inputs to make up for what the rest of the plant community would normally provide. The field with twenty crops does not produce the same amount as the monoculture field divided in twenty ways, but instead produces much more while being a habitat for wild animals, because each plant has its own niche.

#plants #plantarchy #the ways of the plants

[pokemonshelterstories]

Hello! Forgive my ignorance because I don’t know much about the topic, but how bad is Pokerus as a disease? Although I want to raise a Pokémon in the future, my family is currently against having any Pokémon. I do have friends that have Pokémon, but they’ve all been saying Pokerus is a good thing and you’re lucky if your Pokémon gets it. I don’t entirely believe that, because we likely wouldn’t have a vaccine for it otherwise, but I’m still genuinely curious.

although pokerus has some short-term benefits in the way it affects a pokemon's growth, the long-term effects- which have only recently been studied to the point where we're beginning to understand them- can be severe, and they last long past the infection period. there's a reason we don't see it much in the wild; healthy populations of wild pokemon don't test positive for pokerus antibodies.

because pokerus attacks the endocrine system, causing overproduction of testosterone, we see some effects that are positive for battling, but many effects that have an overall negative impact on the pokemon's health. although these pokemon experience great muscular growth, they also experience an increase in aggressive behavior. this can make them too aggressive to battle or even handle, leading to the potential of behavioral euthanasia. in addition, excessively high levels of testosterone can cause physiological issues such as infertility and tissue swelling, and it also puts a strain on the heart and liver.

because these issues can cause premature death or poor quality of life, it is highly recommended to vaccinate against pokerus.

#charlietalks #pkmn irl #pokemon irl #pokemon biology #pokerus