eli5: Why do humans who drink contaminated water like from rivers get sick, while wild animals drinking from the same source don’t?
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Who says the animals are not sick? Most wild animals have parasites for example. So they are not totally healthy. And way back when humans drank from those same sources and we survived. Back then humans had parasites too. That said some animals are more adapted to handling pathogens. Carnivores have shorter intestines. This allows them to poop out pathogens before they cause a problem. Vultures and other animals have very very acidic stomachs that help kill pathogens. But animals do get sick all the time. You don’t see them quite as much as they become targets of predators that take them out of the population. So you mostly see healthy animals, or in other words healthy enough to survive.
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