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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Maybe related with the desert dust that fell over most Europe just in the same weeks with the rains and could have some harmful substance or organism with them.

I assume that the Russians did not caused anything nasty in Chernobyl that we aren't aware still, or that the war didn't bring some nasty substances to Europe via clouds and rain but... trust but verify.

But the US cases are an outlier.

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You don't need to worry about unknown radioactive exposure. We have a very good monitoring system that will detect even very minor releases once they become distributed. The reporting channels in the west are trustworthy too.

In addition we have widespread atmospheric monitoring as well. You can circumvent that by releasing only substances that are not watched, but I don't think that's that easy, and you'd have to do it intentionally. Eg anything connected with fire will show up.

Sahara dust is a thing that's been happening for hundreds of thousands of years, so I don't think that's anything to worry about (it's a valuable source of phosphorus for nature / farming as well). You're reaching for explanations btw.

Sahara dust is pretty common thing in Europe. And if that was the case, wouldn't it be worse in the countries the dust came from?

Perhaps not, assuming they were exposed to it their whole lives, and have immunity to the local microorganisms. For a more relatable example, don't drink the water in Mexico, even if you see the locals drinking it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33204807/

Some viruses that cause acute hepatitis are transmitted by water. And could be in a different genus than Hepatitis virus like Epsein-Bar; Is not impossible also that we would face a different new virus moving with the dust from one of the African endemic areas.

In any case liver troubles mean normally poison troubles, using a broad definition of poison, or immunitary problems

I just realized that I'm forgetting also that in this particular period we had the most massive migration of people in Europe since WWII. This could also be a facilitator in the path faeces-water-oral.

If it was covid I assume that the problem would be detected before and would appear widespread by in all continents at the same time. Hitting much harder the countries with more number of Covid cases.

But what we have instead is a (mostly) Atlantic European issue. (Spain, Denmark, Ireland, Scotland. Looks like a pattern here [1]). Europe had only two rare global events in this time interval that I am aware, the dust affecting the Western countries of Europe (if I'm not wrong), and the war.

[1] (Scomber fish migration?... probably not, but also happened in this time and all hypotheses are valuable).

Radiation poisoning would present very differently from Hepatitis.

After checking it, it seems that in low doses can cause it, there is even a medical term for that (RILD):

https://radiopaedia.org/articles/radiation-induced-liver-dis...

But I could be wrong

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