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If I was the head of funding agency, I would be most interesting in funding the research that more related to increasing public health as whole in the population. One of the most interesting I had read in the class is the research from Martin J. and Blaser and Stanley, “What are the consequences of the disappearing human microbiota?”. In this research they state that without the microorganism in our body, the possibility of obesity and asthma will increase. Nowaday, we have been over protecting ourselves from germ and bacteria that actually lowering the diversity of our microbes community, also our immune system. In the conclusion, they announce that, they would intersting in distinguish the different between pathogens and amphibians with the microbes in our body, to provide a better prevention and treatment on disease and  public health education.

• Brain cancers
• heart disease
• Diabetes
• Asthma
• Skin diseases
• Celiac disease
• Cystic fibrosis

Comparing to the writing exercise #1, there are more non-indirections disease that I can list out, and what I take away from this course is that even though the disease I listed is not infection disease, some of the disease might still be affected by the microbes activity in our body. For example, if you have a wealthy diverse microbial community on our skin, it actually could increase the ability of our immune system and decrease the possibility of cancer development.

Explain the significance that each of these questions have on interpreting scientific literature. Which is most helpful when discussing controversy, and why?

• Can experiments detect differences that matter?

The most important word in this question is the “matter”, it doesn’t matter if the gene that got affected doesn’t do harm or involved in any harmful result of human health.

• Does the study show causation or correlation?

In other word for this question  could be, is the result is cause by this reason or if the data just happen to show a strong relationship between on it. If it is just a correlation, which mean it doesn’t directly affect the  on the target, however, there might be a link between the source and the result in the pathway of the effection. Having a strong supporting evidence to prove that the study have a causation data and result could help the researcher focus on the right topic.

• What is the mechanism?

It’s important to learn the mechanism of the target work, most research or experience  focusing on the beginning and the end of the pathway or process on what they are studying.  However, if they want to cure or fix the problem, the best way is to know the mechanism and figure out a way to stop it or improve it.

• How much do experiments reflect reality?

By relate the topic to reality could help reader understanding the importance of studying it and bring  awareness of how this study could affect our society. Another reason is to find sponsor for the study or experiments, being able to bring up attention of how the study is important to the society could often getting more support on develop the study to the next level.

• Could anything else explain the results?

It’s fairly important to question your own conclusion and result, most of the study have a really narrow focus on the topic, which mean they could often get the same result as their thesis. However, there’s also another possibility that the result is causing by other mechanism or reason, but just happen to have a data that go along with the thesis.

Describe how microbial communities in the body could influence brain and mental health states. Then, describe how brain and mental health states could influence microbial communities in the body. In what ways might these promote health and/or disease?

Human body is full of microbia, and those microbial communities influence our health in both mentally and physically ways. There’re numerous nerve connect between our gut directly to our brain, which mean the microbes that live in our guts could have a strong effect to our brain with their neurotransmitter production and metabolism. According to the reading for this week, those neurotransmitter hormones could trigger the change in our brain gene expression and resulting in mental health disease.

In additional, brain could also have control on our microbial communities in our body from the same signal pathway, which is form the nerve system and hormone. When individual is stress, their brain will release a certain hormone that will decrease activity of specific microbes in our body. One example hormone is the cortisol, it’s produced by the adrenal glands when people experience stress, and this kind of hormone will affect different kinds of  microbes’ metabolic causing the change in blood sugar level, appetite, or even immune response.

In conclusion, having a health metal health could reduce the risk of negative affect on our physical health. Reduce stress time to time can help our microbes maintain their metabolic activity and population, which will benefit our health.

Reflect on the peer-review process with you as the reviewer. How did it feel to read and critique someone else’s writing? What did you learn that you can apply to your own writing as you revise your final essay?

In my opinion, by reading someone else’s writing, give me a chance to know more about the topic and how other people approaches it. By reading other people’s paper, I can find the most common mistake their make and be extra careful with it when revising my own paper, and learn what kind of words choice people make that I could adapt to my own paper to make it more professional or readable. I personally think peer review is a really great way to improve writing skills in both the reviewer and the writer. Reading other people article could help me get a better understanding on what kind of thought the reader have while they are reading this kind of paper, and what kind of common confusions are in the paper, so I can avoid those mistake.

Describe the process of peer review to someone who does not frequently read scientific articles. In your response, consider the pros and cons of peer review and how that might impact the credibility of the results that come from that scientific article.

Once an author finished his or her project or paper, they will ask their peer or people who working closely to the topic they are working on to review it before having it published. The peer will evaluated the paper and provided feedback with credibility.  The benefit for peer review is that people with in the same field could examined and approved the information in the paper, and with the approval of many professional in the same field, it increase the support and verified the information in the paper. However, depend on the paper and the purpose of the paper, peer review could take time and causing the submission on the paper to get push back. Also, if the topic or the purpose of the paper is to challenge some principle knowledge within the field, it could get attack or disapprove by many professional in the same field, or incorrectly feedback on the paper.

List and describe as many changes in human behaviors as you can think of that contribute to decreased exposure to microbes.

• Antibiotic use: The improvement of medical access to our society increase the intake of antibiotic in our population and decrease the diversity of microbes in our body.
• Parents education: Nowadays, most parents have some level of education on health and how germ and bacteria could harm our health. So they often forbidden they kids to do some activity like playing in the mud, touching plants or unknown insect, which will lower the possibility of explore to new microbes.
• sterilization: Due to the improvement on our technology, we have sterilization machine everywhere in the public place, like school, hospital, mall, and park. It increasing the rate of constantly killing the bacteria on our skin.
• cleaning product: Most of the chemical product we have today could kill at least 90% of the bacteria on a surface of our environment, and constantly using these kind of product on the our environment had decreased the  microbes surrounding us.
• cooking food: In the past, lots of culture foods are base on marinated or half cook foods, which could still have a lots of microbes on them. But after the bird fluid, people have start cooking their food longer and stop eating food if there are not fully cook.

Free write

1. Free Write #1: Some of the most interesting stuff I learned in this class are how  strongly the microbes inside our gut could effected our health, and how little we had understand them, but still be able to came up with a treatment to treat those infection. After knowing all those information, I’m really carious about is there anything we had been doing in the past are actually hurting us instead of helping. For example, teaching our children to be clean and sanitize everything they touch and play, this might lower the chance on infection of bad bacteria but also reduce the diversity of their microbes community? (Can’t find the underline function, so I bold it)
2.  Teaching our children to be clean and sanitize everything they touch and play, this might lower the chance on infection of bad bacteria but also reduce the diversity of their microbes community. Study have prove that the more diversity our microbes community are, the more healthy we are. And using antibiotic and  sanitize our environment could lower the microbes in our body, will this be one of the factor that causing our generation to have a lower ability on our immune system?
3.  REFLECTION: Based on what I write, I might be focusing on how to maintain the diversity in our gut, and how did environment effect our microbes community, will the children in a well developed country have a weaker immune system than the child who live in the environment that are lack of resource and the knowledge of public health? And by looking at the information I got, to predict weather protecting our children from germ is actually harming them or not.

List and describe potential factors that the mother or the infant could be exposed to that could influence the colonization of the microbial community in the newborn infant

1. Antibiotic use: Long-term use of antibiotic could decrease the diversity of microbe  community inside human body. During the pregnancy, it might decrease the amount of microbes that got transfer into new born child, which will also decrease the diversity inside new born.
2. Diet: Placenta is a organ that transport nutrients into baby from mother’s blood. And according to what kind of diet mother was eating it could directly effect the nutrients inside her blood and transfer into her baby. For example, if the mother had been eating high fat diet, it might effecting her own lipid metabolism which also have the potential to transfer that problem into her baby by placenta.
3. Environmental: There’re different microbes flowing in the air, which could easily infected human by breathing them into our body. Mother who live in an environment that have high concentration of bad microbes is more likely to get infected and transfer it to their child.

Personal philosophy for antibiotics

My personal philosophy about taking antibiotics is never take it unless it’s emergency. I had always been wondering why did different doctors always gave me different kinds of medical treatment when I tell them the exactly same things of how I feel while I’m sick, and I found out, most of the doctor give medication to patient by the general symptom they have. Which mean the antibiotics might be way powerful than you need. Which might be harmful to your body and increase the rate of those disease to develop antibiotics residence. Also, if we always depend on antibiotics, it will decrease the chance of improving our immune system and whit blood cells.

When I’m sick, I will normally drink lots of water, eat non-season foods to lower the stress or work to my digest system, and sleep more than I need to. Unless I have a midterms, or something important to do the next day, then I will take some antibiotics to speed up my healing process.