The Human Microbiome Project has the goal of mapping the microbe (bacteria) communities existing in various parts of your body: stomach, intestines, nasal passages, skin, and so forth. The interesting part of the project is what scientists are starting to find out about how certain bacteria are essential to a healthy life. In an article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker, researcher Martin Blaser talks about a specific bacteria: Helicobacter pylori. For those of us who grew up understanding ulcers to be a result of stress, it was a major discovery in 1982 that H. pylori (as it is affectionately called) was actually a causing agent for ulcers, gastritis, and stomach cancers. In a fairly obvious step, the treatment for these conditions changed to an antibiotic regimen. What Martin Blaser and others have found in the last few years is that this bacteria, which is harmful to adults, is actually very helpful to children. A number of studies have shown that children without the H. pylori bacteria in their stomach are more likely to have issues with asthma.
According to the article,
"Babies delivered by Cesarean section lack many microbes that are routinely transferred from mother to child. Last year, nearly a third of the four million children born in the United States were delivered by Cesarean section. (In China, the figure was closer to fifty per cent.) The incidence of allergies and asthma is far higher among those children than it is for vaginal-birth babies."Another important function of the H. pylori bacteria is that it is connected with two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, that are instrumental in regulating our appetite. They work together to let us know when we are hungry and when we are full and should stop eating. Our bacteria friend helps to keep the two hormones in balance; without it, we generate too much ghrelin, which makes it more likely for you to overeat. Since World War II, there has been a consistent sharp decline in the number of children infected by H. pylori and a consistent sharp rise in childhood obesity.
The article cautions us to not get too carried away yet with canceling our antibiotic approach to health. For many diseases, only antibiotics can keep those infected from dying. The Human Microbiome Project was founded in 2008. In 2012, the normal microbial ecosystem for healthy humans was published. What is not known for many of the bacteria is what the overall function of each bacteria is.
"The hope is that someday researchers will treat bacteria with highly specific antibiotics and then rebuild our damaged ecosystem with probiotics—strains of bacteria that could act as surrogate farmers in our internal ecosystems. One study, in mice, showed that the toxic side effects of a colon-cancer drug were eased by blocking a particular bacterial enzyme. It’s promising, but we need to move very carefully to confirm the results when they look so good."
Note 1: Not a single probiotic (like those found in yoghurt or in pill form) sold in the United States has been approved or certified as a drug. They are dietary supplements and have very little evidence of value. In fact researchers argued that the mix of bacteria in some that they had tested had given them cause for concern. Some bacteria, when mixed, can be deadly. Michael Fischbach of UCSF cites the lack of evidence for the efficacy of current probiotic supplements to be equivalent to that of snake oil medicines of a hundred fifty years ago.
Note 2: There is a growing (and really, really scary) push to label childhood vaccinations as the source of a number of childhood problems, most prominently, autism. Every scientific journal I look at debunks this. The article mentions that there are no scientific studies that back up the connection between vaccination and autism. Unfortunately, autism tends to become evident at about the same time that children get a large number of their vaccinations. Based on that correlation, scientists have looked for a cause and effect relationship and have found no evidence at all. It is similar to the outcry in 1952 when some doctors noticed that the incidence in polio in children increased in the summer at exactly the same time as the amount of ice cream children were eating increased. The increase in sugar, they said, was the cause of polio. Luckily, within a year, a virus was discovered to be the culprit and, by 1955, a polio vaccine had been developed that caused the disease rates to plummet. Please ignore the hysteria about vaccinations and follow your doctor's advice in vaccinating your children.
