Discussion on:

Worms - a medical miracle for arthritis sufferers?

'Hygiene Hypothesis'....


... It's another No **** Sherlock moment. Fundamentally what is your Immune System for and, how does it keep in condition and evolve - By being exposed to nasty stuff.

There are many ways to illicit the same immune response - without ingesting potential parasites. There are a wide variety of organic compounds that produce immune responses including the cytokine cascade referenced above. Probably the safest is the simple polysaccharide Beta D-Glucan isolated from the cell walls of bakers yeast - and is so early evolved and retained to have receptor sites on hemocytes from hydra's to humans.

I think you misunderstand the treatment here. The worms do not trigger an immune response, they *suppress* the body's immune response. For folks with auto-immune diseases, this what is needed. You are correct that triggering an immune response is relatively easy, doing the opposite is definitely not or we'd have decent treatments today.

even as i cringe i welcome this new path "nosy" humans are treading.
yes, even before we formulized science, it was plain curiosity or nosiness, if you will.
i cringe even though i'm not autoimmune but if i were, i'm sure i would take the worm.

...the rules are 'esthetic' not safety and the maximum percentage of insect 'parts' is up to the inspector...

You are an omnivore and can pretty much eat anything not directly toxic or parasitic/infectious...and even a certain amount of things which are directly toxic or parasitic/infectious.

.. I might wait until the word 'little' is changed to 'zero' in the comment in the article "Theres also little risk of the worms evolving" :o)

No biologist will ever likely say 'zero' chance of anything. The question is not of absolute safety--doesn't exist. The question is relative safety to other possible treatments correlated with success and probable side-effects.

Given that the vast majority of the human body is made of bacteria, and we are far from a single organism, adding an additional symbiote is nature's most usual way of adding features...more so than genetic changes.

I think that if you (or anyone) were suffering from an autoimmune disease, you wouldn't be able to drink that shot of pig worm eggs fast enough... Pain, foggyness in the brain, general malaise all the time, fatigue, headaches, etc... Drugs that have side effects so bad that a person usually flips a coin to decide which is worse, death or misery. While this is not a cure, it is very welcome among those who suffer and can barely tollerate the meds.

If it meant I would no longer live with constant pain, I'd happily let a couple of living worms take up residence in my gut.

If you think this is gross, look up Fecal Transplant on Google

Saw this today. Quite interesting on the subject of Immune Systems.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2233297/What-really-lives-belly-button--researchers-reveal-rainforest-bacteria.html