There is no evidence that long term use of nasal sprays cause significant systemic side effects. Some people do take Flonase for the rest of their lives...

The most mild reason is you may be wasting money on something no longer required.

A concern is it can be masking more serious underlying conditions or the reason you are using is has gotten worse, which should be evaluated.

For instance, Flonase can relieve some issues caused by nasal polyps (little bits of skin growing where they shouldn't be). A better long term option may be surgically removing those. Your family doctor will inspect and compare their number and size to previous observations.

It's always good to check if the reason using are using those long term medications has changed.

Bats are mammals, we are mammals. Bats come into contact with other vectors, such as mosquitos. They sleep in huge dog piles with barely an inch or two ever separating one bat from its neighbor.

Plus they poop, a lot, all over the place. If we were closer to birds, evolutionarily speaking, we'd get even more diseases.

Just the fact that they are mammals and can cover large distances make them pretty effective diisease vectors, it would seem.

Have we seen any reduction in other vaccine usage since the recent big anti-vax wave? I'm wondering if there are a lot of people who used to be fine with the flu vaccine have changed their mind

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And since bats are the only mammals that fly it would be a good guess to say they might have the highest body temperature of all mammals.

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For flu I've not heard of any plans to do so but it's a question I can ask. They have done it for covid and polio I know that much. I would presume as the flu surveillance program is so well established using clinical samples, it might be deemed unnecessary to test waste water?

Although from my own point of view, we actually don't get the full picture of how much flu/what types of flu etc are out there globally in a season because we only get clinical samples (I say only, we get thousands of them!). How many people are actually sick with flu, but don't need medical attention, thus not getting swabbed? It is something I've brought up in general discussion and there was agreement, but currently not much we can do about it.

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If you can and dont mind, would you explain this a little simplified?

While the degree to which the brain is lateralized is often exaggerated, the other responses to your question are downplaying it too much. One of the most significant aspects of lateralization is in areas of the cortex that regulated language processing. It is generally the case that in most people, the left cortex processes the rules and structure of language, whereas the the right side of the brain processes prosody, which is emotional intonation of language. This lateralization is so pronounced that it manifests as one the most distinct forms of lateralization in the brain, anatomically speaking. Specifically, the planum temporale is in some individuals as much as ten times larger on the left than on the right. This difference was first described in seminal work by Wada et al in 1975 in JAMA.

The degree to which this lateralization exists differs between men and women is not entirely clear. Wada et al and other studies found a sex difference, suggesting that men are more likely to be lateralized than women (i.e. left larger than right), which is part of where this idea that women are more "emotionally centered" in their brains than men. Other studies have not found this difference, however.

A fairly recent study did find a sex difference. Interestingly, they also in men with Klinefelter's syndrome, wherein men have XXY sex chromosomes. These men (I need to be careful here, because some studies have shown the individuals with Klinefelter's syndrome are 10X more likely to be transgender than XY individuals) tend to have female-like breast development and other feminine features. The study above also found that XXY men were not different from women in the degree to which their brains are lateralized.

Anyway, there are other studies showing functional differences in emotional processing of faces between men and women, specifically related to lateralization in the brain. In general, males tend to have a stronger response in the right amygdala than in the left.

The final point I will make is that there is enormous overlap between men's and women's brains. We can find differences in lateralization, size of various things, etc, but the differences are relatively small and not always apparent in every study. Further, you cannot take any one individual brain and make clear judgments about how "male" or "female" it is necessarily. Exceptions always exist.

There are many reasons, some of which have already been mentioned:

1. Thermoregulatory control - from torpor/hibernation ability and flight gives them a huge range in body temperature, which naturally controls the proliferation of viruses within their systems.
2. Evolutionary development - they are quite an old order in the mammalian kingdom and hugely diverse, like rodents. This means that pathogens have had a long time to evolve alongside their primary hosts and mutate, giving them a higher chance of jumping the species barrier. Many viruses are actually species specific in bats - so if it transmits from it's primary host species to a naive species, it can cause disease. Most of the Lyssaviruses developed within certain species and will cause rabies like symptoms if transmitted to a genetically diverse enough bat species.
3. Flight - bats can migrate, giving them a very large range to spread their saliva, hair and guano to different areas and potentially exposing humans, other species and colonies on their way.
4. Social colonies - these tend to be in sheltered environments, but they adapt to many locations and so houses, bridges, trees and caves are all fair game. Many outbreaks occur through the aerosolisation of bat guano during mining in caves or kids playing in hollowed out trees (both suspected causes of Ebola outbreaks), rather than contact with bats directly.
5. Diversity of colonies - to protect themselves from inbreeding, many colonies are gender specific and progeny are excluded once they mature to find new colonies elsewhere. They can also divide them up as breeding and maternity colonies - increasing the contact with bats from different places and exposing them to pathogens.
6. Long life span - despite their ability for flight and high metabolic rate, they have a very long life span. They can actually recover from certain viral infections and then be reinfected later along with housing multiple pathogens in their bodies (without apparent ill-effect as primary hosts) which increases the chance of sharing of virulence genes and mutations that give pathogens the potential to jump the species barrier.
7. However, they are not protected from any and all pathogens. White-nose fungus is a prime example of a pathogen that has decimated the North American bat population because it has not evolved alongside the species there. One bat that manages to come out of hibernation and fly can spread the fungus to whole colonies and 90+% can be killed.
8. They do many good things for the environment and human health - including protecting us from insect born diseases and pollinating many different types of plants all over the world. The problem lies with the virulence factors that develop within the pathogens in a huge population, that can ultimately cause significant disease if it manages to jump into another mammal species and has the ability to be transmissible between members of that other species (e.g. humans).

There are also unknown mechanisms, for instance bats do not really get much cancer and maybe there is an overlap in the immune response that protects them from cancer and allows them to become very successful primary hosts for pathogens. This is a large area in research and I am sure has more updated knowledge since I stopped studying the field.

For example: recently identified areas for research - viruses housed in vesicles of stem cells of bats, which suggests there's a lot more going on to immunotolerance of bats than we currently know.

https://www.ucd.ie/newsandopinion/news/2023/february/22/firsteverbatstemcellscouldrevealhowcoronavirusesspreadandevadetheimmunesysteminnewhosts/

Since the lymphoid organs stay (and are the memory cells), why could they not just convey the immune info to the new marrow and progenitor cells?

The exceptionally high metabolism of bats has resulted in the evolution of an exceptionally effective immune system to counter the stress of that metabolism, inflammation, and DNA damage. The downside? That means viruses get into bats and mutate to variants that are stronger and stronger as they try to evade the immune system of these animals. When they hit on a mutation that enables them to jump to a new host species and out of bats, they have become quite nasty.

I might be too late, but maybe some others can also jump in:

What ways do you see/ would you prefer, that activists implement to connect the scientific community of your field with people of the civil society, interested in the matter?

E.g. where could y'all need more communication platform, public interest, financial aid, volunteering?

And how could activists help building the structures on a grass-root, as well as global scale? Maybe those structures already exist somewhere and you know about them and want to see them multiplied, or maybe you have your own ideas about it. :)

Individually, which one is stronger? Hyena or lion?

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Bats don't respond too much to many viruses etc. They're also tiny living instinctually in hard to find, out of the way, dark places away from predators in massively dense populations. Sometimes just a crack in the rock is enough for a huge bat population.

So because of their low response/death from viruses entire populations in a cave will simply serve as a petire dish while viruses pass freely mutating away as they evolve. Then bats will fly KMs away from there looking for insects etc. Some bats will migrate 100s of miles as well. Huge intense breeding ground combined with wide spread area of infection to spread in makes them super dangerous.

There's a cave in uh, Africa, I believe that is considered one of the most dangerous places on earth. They've traced Ebola among other diseases from that location. It's kind of terrifying.

in this case deviant behavior means alcohol consumption or eating disorders.

Imaging if you were able to drink a whole 26oz bottle of vodka without issue, and then you then had half of your body removed. attempting to drink the same amount would be like drinking double what you had been, since you have half the body left to absorb and buffer the effects of alcohol. Could be a recipe for death. Same as with food.. with half a body, you don't need to eat as much, and so you could literally eat yourself to death.