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The microbiome of bacteria in your gut is completely natural and helps your body to successfully function as a digestive agent. There are many ways to change the make up of the bacteria in your gut because they are living organisms that require certain factors in order to live. By changing these factors, you can change what bacteria are there.

To start, you can change your diet. Drastically changing the food that you eat will cause the bacteria in your gut to change as well since different organisms feed on different things. You can eat healthier food (less refined sugars and very processed meals) and add more vegetables (more fiber) to cause a healthy change in bacteria and improve your overall wellbeing. On the other hand, you could eat less healthy food and more processed meals with higher amounts of refined sugars to change the bacteria to ones that like more sugars. This would cause a negative affect on your health. Even small dietary changes like eating animal based foods or avoiding animal based foods will change the microbiome because certain bacteria can break down animal proteins while others do not.

You can also take vitamins and supplements to support the gut microbes that live in your gastrointestinal system. This will cause healthy growth of bacteria and decrease inflammation in the area. Overall, your health will improve with this because the bacteria will function better with the correct nutrients that they require.

There are also studies that show fermented foods will help your gut microbiome flourish. Often times, doctors will recommend this diet when you are on heavy antibiotics because the medication will deplete not only the bacteria that is causing your ailment, but it will also kill off the bacteria that is supposed to be in your body to aid it in daily functions, such as in your gut. By eating fermented foods such as yogurt, kombucha, or even fermented vegetables, your gut bacteria can replenish.

There are many ways to change the bacteria in your gut, but the most evidential way is to change your diet. This can be for the good of your bacterial colonies or for the worst; it all depends on what you eat.

After reading the section of the article by Sarid and Gao (2011) about HPV, if I was a healthcare professional looking to develop treatments I would work toward treating HPV31 and HPV45. While HPV16 and HPV18 were first discovered and seem to be more deadly, all four types cause up to 80% of cervical cancer cases according to Harald zur Hausen, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his work on HPV.
HPV16 and 18 already have a vaccine that has been developed to fight the viruses off, so expanding the treatment options to also cover HPV 31 and 45 could possibly begin to eradicate HPV as a cause of cervical cancer. The vaccines for HPV that already exist are relatively new, so I’m not sure what kind of data exists yet as to how successful it has been in decreasing numbers of cervical cancer in regions that have implemented the vaccine into the lives of women.
A vaccine for the other two deadliest strains could be immensely helpful in lowering the numbers of women who get this horrible disease. It should be administered early in a woman’s developed life (post puberty) once she becomes “at risk” for cervical cancer. By eliminating all four of these strains, the numbers for cervical cancer can possibly go down tremendously. Overall, the ability to cease up to 80% of cervical cancer cases, in my opinion, would outweigh the costs of developing a new vaccine for these two strains.

In the primary research article “Symbiotic gut microbes modulate human metabolic phenotypes” (2007), Min Li et al attempt to explain the link between populations of gut microbes in humans and the humans’ metabolic phenotype through a transgenomic approach. The researchers sampled fecal and urine samples from seven Chinese individuals, each sampled twice, and analyzed them through spectroscopic, microbiomic, and multivariate tools. The purpose of this research was to develop a method of determining metagenomics in the human gut microbe. This study has the potential to influence further research into the field of gut microbiology and the consequences of different phenotypic irregularities.

This prompt was a tough one to think about. A non-infectious disease caused by microorganisms? Yikes. Honestly, I couldn’t think of any myself off the top of my head, so I turned to the glorious site we call Google and did some research. Here’s what I came up with:

1. appendicitis: an infection of the appendix that  could have been caused by a traveling stomach bug
2. asthma: inflammation of the lungs that could be caused by an infection or allergen
3. allergies: I’m not sure if this is considered a disease, but it’s definitely a reaction in the human body that cannot be passed between people and is caused by microorganisms!
4. emphysema: difficulty breathing caused by small particulates (microorganisms??) like ash and smoke from chronic smoking
5. IBS: one reason for irritable bowel syndrome could be due to inflammation of the bowel due to an infection by microorganisms

I did not realize how difficult it would be to think of diseases that were caused by microorganisms but are not passed between people. There are far fewer than I thought. While I was able to find a long list of non-infectious diseases, most of them were autoimmune, cancer, or due to environmental factors that have nothing to do with microorganisms, such as obesity, heart disease, or kidney failure. I am excited to learn more about this section of diseases and am looking forward to realizing how many more things I was totally unaware of (like diseases not passed from person to person but still involve bacteria- how cool!?)