#idk anything abt cyclospora but i do NOT trust a parasitw
respectfully, this is a very classic case of "people on Tumblr who self-admittedly don't know anything about the etiology or pathophysiology of a foodborne outbreak saying confidently incorrect things in a fear-mongering way." this reblog is going around on a post with thousands of notes and unnecessarily scaring and misinforming possibly hundreds or thousands of people.
cyclospora cayetanensis generally causes:
self-limiting^1 explosive/watery diarrhea & associated cramping/nausea/fatigue/weight loss
sometimes low-grade fever, vomiting, body aches, and other flu-like symptoms
^1 this means the infection will ultimately resolve itself, even without treatment
if left untreated, the course of the infection may last a few days up to a month or longer. it can often follow a relapsing course, wherein the person recovers for a period before experiencing another bout of the illness (e.g. in the more prolonged infections). in the large majority of cases where an immunocompetent person is infected, they will recover without any complications. as with any infectious disease, immunocompromised people are at higher risk and should follow more stringent avoidance precautions + seek treatment more urgently if ill.
incubation period ranges from 2 days to 2 weeks; if you come down with symptoms after eating fresh fruits or veggies/drinking contaminated water (or suspecting that cross-contamination with fresh fruits/vegetables/water has occurred), you should see a provider and get an O&P done to check your stool for evidence of the parasite. it can be treated with the medication TMP-SMX to shorten the course of the illness.
the "for reference, malaria is also caused by a protozoan" line as an attempt to provide context or reference point for how afraid people should be is uninformed fearmongering. this line is like if i said "be careful not to come down with a case of bacterial food poisoning--for reference, the black plague is also caused by bacteria!" it is completely nonsensical to imply that this organism is going to leave the average person reading the reblog surviving 'scathed,' as it were, or even not surviving at all, simply because there's another, different single-celled eukaryote that happens to cause malaria. you could have people going to their doctors afraid that they have something like malaria over what ultimately generally amounts to a treatable stomach flu.
and implying that cyclospora cayetanensis is inherently worse or more likely to be lethal than a bacterial infection, simply because it's "bigger and more complicated," is equally out of touch with the realities of bacterial infection. viewing bacterial food poisoning as "dangerous, but something you can expect to weather and survive unscathed" while seeing all parasitic infections as automatically akin to malaria is, quite simply, the result of having heard less about parasitic infections, and automatically assuming that the thing you (think you) know less about is scarier and worse by dint of being unfamiliar. go read about hemolytic uremic syndrome in addition to the above-linked articles on cyclospora, and then think about if e. coli should be de facto implicitly framed as no big deal compared to any given parasitic infection.
ultimately, as you said, you don't know anything about cyclospora. you just presumably live in a country that does not experience very many parasitic outbreaks, view parasites as "those scary mysterious things that only happen Elsewhere, to Other People, like Malaria...", and consequently, feel comfortable confidently asserting fearful assumptions as if they were useful education. and, like, i am ultimately sympathetic to attempts to help provide information for other people, but it is exhausting to see confident misinformation circulating every single time there's an outbreak mentioned on tumblr. and i wish people would do more thoughtful research before scaring themselves and others. there is an entire internet full of sources in both medical and plain language at all of our fingertips.
germansingergirl
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