I’m in the UK. Picked up a bad case of what I thought was food poisoning at the start of October.
Symptoms started two days after I went swimming in my local council/municipal swimming pool, and lasted about 9 days. Wont go into details but at one point I’d lost 7kg. I didn’t eat any solid food for 8 of those days and had under 100kcal a day for about 7 days. Electrolyte tablets, water and Imodium was it for a while.
One night I had an amazing fever with delirious dreams. Had an average HR of 150bpm for 9 hours of “sleep”.
Took two weeks before I was back to normal, still 4kg down on where I was before - which is nice.
Sounds very much like it could have been cryptosporidium. I’ll never know for sure as I didn’t send a sample off (had a chance to via my doctor but didn’t see the point).
> The United Kingdom is experiencing a dramatic outbreak—unprecedented in scale and magnitude—of diarrheal illnesses from the intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium, aka Crypto.
> The outbreak has splattered into almost every region of all four UK nations.
Wasn't expecting toilet humour from the Ars. But seriously (having never heard of Cryptosporidium myself) I was expecting this article to be about some malware which rides on the back of a new hot-garbage shitcoin.
This particular author (Beth Mole) has been with Ars Technica for a very long time and is well-known for her frequent and ubiquitous puns. It's very polarizing within the ArsTechnica community but many readers have come to expect, rely on, and love her writing style. Others are not amused.
Overall I think having one author carry an "El Reg" (The Register) style is probably a net benefit. I appreciate it occasionally, and also appreciate that none of the other authors have adopted it. It's really just a "Beth Mole" special.
>was expecting this article to be about some malware which rides on the back of
The malware was developed by a threat actor know as "evolution", and is written in the obscure DNA programming language. For some reason they are having medical doctors work on debugging and analyzing it. Probably an attempt to prevent a rise in salaries among proper software engineers.
In the meantime, I advise everyone to neither send nor receive emails from colleagues in the UK until more is known.
If it was related one would expect outbreak to start in June/July when people swam in rivers (thought this summer was relatively cold). Not in the September when water outdoors is cold and people swim mostly in pools. It can also be related to travel - in August and September many people take holidays.
No, I think it did come from our sewage dumped in the seas. People swim in it and introduce the infection into swimming pools. That and the bloody Tories penny pinching on testing pools would be why.
“Though we don't know what's behind the UK's startling gush of cases, we do have a solid handle on how Crypto is spread generally. The microscopic parasites infect the human intestines, causing watery diarrhea.”
Not used to seeing these effects of crypto, but it’s hilariously named in this timeline.
Wait until every infection's DNA is sequenced and a "blockchain" of sorts can be maintained, documenting how every single disease morphed, genetically, over time.
Of course this would only work with highly-adaptive (i.e. costant change DNA) infections. And only when sequencing/tracking is less expensive.
Symptoms started two days after I went swimming in my local council/municipal swimming pool, and lasted about 9 days. Wont go into details but at one point I’d lost 7kg. I didn’t eat any solid food for 8 of those days and had under 100kcal a day for about 7 days. Electrolyte tablets, water and Imodium was it for a while.
One night I had an amazing fever with delirious dreams. Had an average HR of 150bpm for 9 hours of “sleep”.
Took two weeks before I was back to normal, still 4kg down on where I was before - which is nice.
Sounds very much like it could have been cryptosporidium. I’ll never know for sure as I didn’t send a sample off (had a chance to via my doctor but didn’t see the point).
Haven’t been back to my local pool yet though.