I mean from a risk assessment angle how sick could a single gnat carcass make a person? People eat 1-2 pounds of insects/larvae on average over the course of a year, personally I aim for 3. Add to that the alcoholic nature of most wines and I’d say the risk is negligible.
So really the only two dilemmas I can sus out would be financial and moral.
Discarding the wine is an absolute waste of resources.
Morally, that fly died before it got into the wine OR it flew in as a sober decision to get plastered before its very short lifespan concluded naturally. Commendable.
Very good, aha. It was more coming from the vantage point of me not wanting to end up with some weird Lymes type situation. I know its primarily deet ticks but i’m using that as a stand-in and most prescient example of thr kinda bugshit I wanna be proactive about :)
Lol … I was born and raised in northern Ontario. I’m indigenous and I’ve spent a lot of time in the northern wilderness which has lots and lots of swamp land and in the summer hosts billions of biting insects.
My parents were born in the bush so life out there was normal for us.
I remember spending summers out camping in July with clouds of black flies, mosquitoes, deer flies, midges and sand flies… when we drank a cup of tea by the fire, you first had to skim off the drowning insects before taking a sip.
Which is why when you meet many old timer Indigenous person in northern Ontario, they’re dressed in long pants and long sleeved clothing in the summer. The only time I wear tshirts or shorts is if there is a strong wind or I’m planning on jumping in the water some time soon. In the evening and especially at night, I’ll cover up every inch of exposed skin.
It always amazes me when I have my southern friends visit me, sit around a fire at dusk in tank tops and shorts and complain about the bugs … then slather on tons of insect repellent and complain about the chemicals they put on.
… all while I skim off the bugs from my drink and take a sip.
Lots of things work … including dryer sheets … but the problem is that you have to apply whatever product or diy trick or whatever you are using on every bit of your skin … every piece of skin. If you have one spot the size of a penny of untreated skin anywhere on your body, the insects will find it and sting you there. The best way to do all this is to find a vat of insect repellent, swim in it for 10 seconds and come out. And even then, it only works for about half an hour or hour because your skin is constantly changing … all that has to happen is you sweat a little bit, the repellent washes off and now you have an untreated section that the bugs will find.
It’s a never ending battle and the bugs always win. Part of surviving in these conditions is to accept that you will get bitten … you just minimize the bites and you learn to live with getting bitten.
There is research I’ve read that more and more people are becoming so accustomed to never wanting to be bitten that they spend their lives in a bubble away from biting insects that it becomes a severe problem when they do get bitten … even to the point where they develop allergic reactions because they do such a good job avoiding it all.
I grew up in these conditions and I remember being a dumb kid running around the bush and being covered in welts all summer long and never thinking it was unusual.
As a teen, I remember a few summers with my friends where the mosquitos grew so thick and noisy at dusk that you could literally choke on them as they filled your nose and mouth.
Now as an adult, I minimize the number of bites but when I do get bitten (which is still fairly high) I don’t really mind it all that much. You build a tolerance to them over time. Like anything uncomfortable and unavoidable in the world you learn to live with them.
Lots of solutions work … temporarily and for certain circumstances and for people of certain biologies.
There is research that says that some people just naturally attract more mosquitoes than others. I remember reading a few places a long time ago that said that it ranged about one in seven people attract more than others. I think I am one of those seven because I remember being frustrated as a teen with my friends. We all came from the same background, did the same things, tolerated the same things but for whatever reason, more mosquitoes bothered me than any of them. I changed my diet, changed my shampoo, didn’t shower for a week or more, changed clothing, changed detergent … nothing worked so I just accepted it. Years later, read about how some people attract more mosquitoes than others and it made sense.
So if you do go out there and do your best to avoid the insects … don’t be discouraged that you turn out to be the one that attracts more than others … sometimes it just works out that way.
**Do fruit flies carry any diseases?**Fruit flies do not carry infectious agents on the inside of their bodies. They are not disease vectors. However, they can carry bacteria on the outside of their bodies and transmit them by contact with fruits or vegetables, which can cause disease when consumed.
**Is it safe to eat food that has been touched by fruit flies?**No, it is not safe. If food was touched by fruit flies, there may be bacteria that cause disease. The appropriate strategy is to remove the damaged area of the food or to dispose of it.
**Can fruit flies be harmful to humans?**Fruit flies are not harmful to humans. They do not bite or sting. They also don’t have venom. However, when fruit flies wound ripe fruit or vegetables to lay eggs, bacteria can enter the food, and when humans consume it, they can get a disease.
**What happens if you eat a fruit fly?**There is no scientific evidence of diseases caused by eating a fruit fly. Also, there is no scientific evidence that eating the fruit fly’s eggs can cause disease.
So this just told me that eating fruit flies will give you a disease, followed by a statement that there’s no evidence that eating fruit flies will give you a disease
It’s the trouble with researching and reading around questions like these because you’ll get a lot answers like this one that seem more sensible than others and even provide some pretty plausible sounding reasoning behind their conclusions but then proceed to either directly contradict themselves, or simply leave an obvious implicit contradiction unaddressed.
The issue I think is, if we take what’s said as true (no telling if it is, but again, sounds pretty reasonabland plausible) it can’t tell you much about the real likelihood that it will actually cause you real problems in real life. It seems entirely reasonable to believe that fruit flies may carry bacteria on the surface of their bodies and that that bacteria could be harmful and so reasonable for the author to include and thus not be giving dangerous advice just saying everything is safe don’t worry about it. But it’s also kind of useless what are the odds the particular bacteria is going to be harmful vs something your body can easily dispatch? How much bacteria would you need to ingest for it to be dangerous? Is there enough of it on one fruitfly to be problematic? If so, what about the surfaces of different foods? What about liquids? Including wine? What are the relative odds of all of these factors aligning just right to make you sick?
If you replace fruitfly in that text with just fly, I expect that would likely also be true. If you asked people can you eat cake that’s had a fly on it you’ll get a gamut of responses from people saying of course it’s fine they do it all the time to people saying it’ll definitely make you sick to a more nuanced response like this one, but I bring up the case of flies in particular because the fact is the odds are very good that you eat food a fly has been on all the time because they land on it and then fly away without any noticing. Sometimes people eat the food and get sick and the mechanism for how that happened might be exactly as described, but then again most of the time you eat a slice of cake from a display case and you’re fine despite it likely having had many visitors on its surface during its time there.
Despite its seemingly contradictory way in which it’s written, I think this is probably consistent, it provides a mechanism how a fruit fly could make you sick then goes on to say there’s no evidence that fruit flies do make you sick, which is not surprising because attributing a case where someone got sick from ingesting bacteria to a fruit fly is going to be pretty difficult when there’s so many mechanisms by which that could happen to you.
Frankly without providing some additional context to nail down how likely the proposed mechanism is to actually cause disease and in what specific circumstances that type of information is truthful yet misleading. Honestly, I’d drink it, but I can’t honestly say I have any solid evidence that’s definitely safe, only that it just seems so unlikely that it could represent a serious threat, whilst being capable of happening so easily yet not seeming to represent a major public health concern. It seems like if it really was that dangerous, human cohabitation in areas with any appreciable fruit fly population would be untenable.
I think the difference is that normal flies are much more likely to have walked on dead things and shit. Wasn’t there also something that they actually spit on your food to distribute bacteria so their eggs have a better rotting environment to maggot around in after they hatch?
I think it’s saying that you can eat the fruit fly, but not food the fruit fly has touched.
It’s always worth remembering, though, that bacteria live on some foods more easily than others. I’d be surprised if most bacteria could live long in wine.
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