The Senkaku Islands, also known as the Diaoyu Islands, are claimed by both the PRC and ROC as an island chain under the Yilan County of Taiwan.
The historical context for this island claim is the most absurd: neither the PRC nor ROC were invited to the San Francisco Peace Treaty talks with Japan. A few months prior, the ROC’s Chiang Kai-Shek had signed the Potsdam Declaration with Allied leaders and explicitly declared which islands Japan could hold sovereignty over (the Senkakus were, notably, excluded). However, de facto sovereignty was overseen by the US until 1972, when the Okinawa Reversion shifted sovereignty to Japan.
If there is one territorial claim where the PRC and ROC are in the right with, it’s this one… Not the random claims the ROC has with Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Bhutan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, or Tajikistan (for which the PRC has negotiated and settled with), but for this attempt by Allied powers to ostracize a weak China and discredit the sacrifice of Chinese lives post-WW2.
Capitalism only functions in an environment of competition. Because of our absolute domination of the Soviet Union, we’ve had no need to improve.
There’s a reason wages were so high back in the day compared to now. It’s because if people didn’t get paid what they were owed, then we would lose mindshare to communism.
When most of the source of innovation in your country is brain-drain from other countries, but then those countries start fostering their own economy, so smart people want to stay.
Couple that with the deteriorating economic situation in US and rampant racism. People are finally starting to see burgerland for the shithole it really is.
You’ll need to monitor it and take antibiotics before symptoms kick in, otherwise it may be too late.
In any case, the higher mortality, the lower the chance of spreading. There are and were plenty of viruses, for example, that have a similar mortality rate, but that’s exactly why there’s no outbreak - patients are easy to identify and isolate, and in the wild many die before propagating anything.
The bacteria causing this (Streptococcus pyogenes) causes hundreds of millions of illnesses each year, ranging from the mild “strep throat” to the extremely severe scarlet fever. Whilst there have been a few outbreaks of antibiotic resistant strains of this bacterium, that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on in this outbreak, so thankfully the underlying streptococcus infection should be treatable with standard antibiotics.
Unfortunately, the condition that’s actually killing people (Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome (STSS)) is caused by exotoxins released by the bacteria, and killing the bacteria only stops further exotoxins from being produced — antibiotics can’t do anything about the exotoxins that have already been secreted by the bacteria. If you’ve ever wondered why we can’t cook spoiled food to make it safe to eat, this is a large part of why — exotoxins are often better at sticking around than the bacteria that produce them. It doesn’t help that exotoxins are often super potent toxins (Botulism is a particularly potent and well known example).
It’s not clear what causes some cases of Streptococcus pyogenes to escalate and non-eventful cases of strep are common enough that treating every case with antibiotics is implausible. It’s tricky because if symptoms are severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of STSS, then things will have already progressed enough that the exotoxins present s risk to health even if antibiotics are administered. This outbreak of many cases of the severe STSS is concerning because it might indicate that the strep bacteria has evolved to be more deadly, but we really don’t know why there’s such a cluster of severe illness in one place.
Okay there’s our smoking gun! So they too eat bats probably. I gotta assume that wherever we find bats, there’s at least one idiot hungry enough to fry one.
Well I can’t speak for that YouTube video, but my searching is coming up with a bunch of people saying that bat meat is generally not eaten in Japan. There might be people there who eat it. Who knows? People eat roadkill.
I guess they're linking it to easing COVID restrictions because hand washing helps prevent it. Did people stop washing their hands after using the toilet in Japan once the restrictions let up?
Maybe I'm not understanding you. Why not say it is up from 2021 and 2022 instead of it is up since restrictions were in place? They are linking the uptick to the easing of restrictions by highlighting that as a difference between now and then.
Hand washing was encouraged and presumably increased during the restrictions. For any other country I would assume that also meant after using the toilet people were more likely to wash hands. But how much would that have impacted that culture in Japan?
Did people stop washing their hands after using the toilet in Japan once the restrictions let up?
Did…they start?
Having lived briefly in Japan and for a while in Korea, most people left public (and workplace) washrooms without washing their hands. Even during the pandemic.
You’re fucking joking. I give people the side-eye when they do that here in the U.S. and there are still plenty of people that at least go through the trouble of rinsing off their hands. Sure, most people don’t make sure to really get the soap everywhere like I do, but for most people to do absolutely nothing…
This one's kind of funny to me. I lived for two years in Japan not knowing that men's restrooms typically don't even have soap. Women's restrooms usually do, and they get used. Despite me having lived there, it was my husband who taught me that there is no soap in the men's restrooms when we went on a visit.
That was the weirdest part to me. In Korea, there was usually soap in the washrooms. But in either of those countries, you’d occasionally either find no soap in the men’s rooms, or you’d find empty soap canisters.
Telling a staff member there was no soap got the reaction that a tourist in NA politely telling a police officer that they saw some litter on the sidewalk over there, lol
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