Month: January 2018

List of behaviors that could change a gut microbial community:

Drinking bleach: would vastly reduce the number of microbes present in the gut community. This could result in a reduction in the number of microbes responsible for: maintaining the structural integrity of gut tissues, fighting off pathogenic organisms, or aiding in digestion; which would ultimately lead to a decline in health. Additionally, any surviving bacteria may be able to grow out of control due to the vastly reduced competition, resulting in disbiosis. (PS This is all assuming that drinking bleach didn’t kill you in the first place.)

Eating sugar-laden foods: The sudden bump in glucose levels would likely provide the gut bacteria with an increased food supply. An increase in local resources could cause a population boom throughout the microbial community due to the lessened stresses of competition. This increase in population may cause a dramatic change in microbe proportions, resulting in disbiosis and possible pathogenic effects. As a side note, the subsequent die-off of microbes after a reduction in glucose presence may have toxic effects on the human host.

Taking a probiotic supplement: Could increase the diversity of microorganisms present in an individual’s gut. According to lecture, this increase in microbiota diversity can result in a more stable and resilient microbial community, capable of resisting disbiosis and preventing negative effects on the human body and its health.

Walking around licking every surface in sight: Through oral contact with a wide array of microbial communities, the micro-biome of the gut would likely blossom with new species and  great diversity. Unfortunately, indiscriminately loading on new bacterial species makes it incredibly likely that there will be conflict between organisms in the gut, and even more likely that one of the organisms consumed would be pathogenic, subsequently hurting the health of the individual.

 

After reading through Sarid and Gao’s 2011 article, It would be my belief that it’s HPV strains 31 and 45 that should be considered the most crucial in terms of developing a new treatment.

While there are many HPV strains which aren’t understood well enough to fully gauge how grave their effects may be on human health, and others which have been shown correlate to various cancers throughout the human body,  there are currently only four “high-risk” HPV types: 16, 18, 31, and 45. Of these four known cancer-causers (which are responsible for up to 80% of ALL cervical cancer cases), strains 16 and 18 have already been met with effective treatments. This effectively narrows the most necessary subjects of medical research to HPVs 31 and 45.

While some of the other HPV variations which are less well studied may also be incredibly important to treat or cure, current knowledge on these iterations is just to sparse to justify intensive medical research. Additionally, the funds and time required to bring these outliers into a more reasonable level of awareness would be better spent trying to providing tangible care systems for versions 31 and 45, which we already know to be crucially important. After all, would you rather spend 10 years dying from a disease while trying to figure out how bad another one was, or allocate the resources necessary to quell the first disease before seeking to understand the second?

On another note, as far as when to treat is concerned, given that HPV is a virus and that many viruses are considered near impossible to treat or cure, care should be prophylactically administered before any infections occur at all, providing the lowest risk of the affliction progressing towards oncogenesis.

 

It’s easy to come up with a list of infectious diseases caused by micro organisms, or non communicable diseases caused by things other than microorganisms (I mean REALLY easy), but it’s much more difficult to find non-infectious diseases caused by microbes. After thinking on the subject for a while, I was only able to come up with three of different examples. I’ve heard that some forms of cancer (ie. gastrointestinal) can be influenced by different microbes, and that microorganisms can have a hand in the progression and formation of heart disease. The other example I could think of is Heliobacter pylori’s ability to cause ulcers, and ultimately, gi cancer as well.

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