Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| Book review: “Missing Microbes” by Martin J. Blaser |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2014-09-06
What do asthma, food and other allergies, obesity, GERD, early-onset diabetes, certain breast-cancers, and autism (to name a few diseases) have in common? They have become “modern plagues”—that is, widespread diseases in the developed world—since the widespread use of antibiotics, especially among young children,and birth by C-section became common there. The differences were stark and almost paradoxical. The 157 North Americans had only a few taxa that were unique to them, while the 12 Amerindians had more than a hundred unique species that were not present in most of the U.S. subjects. Plus they had more taxa than the U.S. subjects by far, even though many species were found in low numbers. H-p, he tells us, is both an enemy and a friend. As an enemy, it promotes ulcers and stomach cancer (usually in people of advanced ages). As a friend, it helps induce a robust immune system in human young. Among MDs, he has had trouble, discussed below, promoting the idea that H-p is helpful in early life; that its absence in the stomachs of young humans promotes early-onset asthma and other allergies and also promotes GERD—a disease of the esophagus—in older folks who lack H-p. The lack of H-p in the human stomach is a twentieth century thing. Before the invention of antibiotics, everyone had H-p, inherited in the normal birthing process from their mothers or otherwise acquired at a very young age. People born by C-section are also likely to lack those elements of their normal flora which should have been acquired during the birthing process from the slide down the birth canal. The lack of microbes is not only due to use of antibiotics; sometimes they never got “in place” in the first place. Of course, H-p is not the only microbe “inherited” during birth. Many microbes including H-p make up the various human “microbiomes”—the armies of microbes which inhabit the mucosa of human GI-tracts, skin, noses, vaginas; which cover the skin; etc. Blaser has had trouble promoting his idea among MDs because H-p has been known by MDs, a stubborn lot, as the cause (or one cause) of ulcers and stomach cancer, and doctors have been unwilling to entertain the thought that a microbe which is pathogenic (as cause of ulcers and stomach cancer) could also be valuable (as an early-life stimulus to the immune system). This particular stubbornness of the MDs reminds me of the vast stubbornness by which the medical profession (and Big Pharma) greeted the idea put forward c.1970 by Kim McCully, MD, that arteriosclerosis might be caused by problems with homocysteine, and vitamins B-6 and B-12 and folic acid rather than by cholesterol in the diet. Whether he was right, or they were, or they both were, or both were wrong, the savage way he was put down professionally when his early papers appeared seems a valuable lesson about the unwillingness of the medical profession to open its collective minds. My “take-away”, having read 143 of 220 pages, is that it would be a valuable experiment to give to some babies living in allergy and asthma-prone neighborhoods a teaspoon of H-p to drink early in life and thereafter after each time they are given antibiotics so that their GI-tracts would resemble those of our ancestors. Later in life, if necessary (upon signs of ulcers) they could be given antibiotics specific to H-p to wipe it out. That way they could have the help of H-p (if any) when young and avoid the harms (again, if any should appear) later in life. The author’s conclusion is largely a call to stop over-use of antibiotics, to ban the use of antibiotics to fatten cattle and chickens, etc., and to reduce the use of birth by Ceasarian section—or use vaginal swabs to transfer mom’s flora to baby’s skin and mouth. But the last paragraph answers my call: In 1998 I predicted in the British Medical Journal that we would one day be giving H. pylori, a disappeared organism, back to our children. Since then, the support for this idea has only grown deeper and the list of disappeared organisms longer. But these are early days in the discovery process; most of the workings of the mechanisms are still secret. |
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