This New York Times health piece points out a rather disgusting-sounding fact:
Every person alive is host to about 100 trillion bacterial cells. They outnumber human cells 10 to one and account for 99.9 percent of the unique genes in the body.
Some of these bacteria are bad, but many are not. In fact, the destruction of some of them may account for a number of chronic diseases.
Some scientists theorize that the heavy use of antibiotics in the last few decades may help explain the recent rise of several diseases. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a connection between digestive bacteria and certain gastrointestinal disorders, such as Crohn’s or Celiac disease. But microbiome also may be related to ailments in other parts of the body, like cardiovascular problems, asthma, and arthritis.
For example:
He [infectious disease specialist Dr. Martin J. Blaser] and other researchers, including a team from Switzerland and Germany, have also linked the serious rise in asthma rates to the “rapid disappearance of Helicobacter pylori, a bacterial pathogen that persistently colonizes the human stomach, from Western societies.”
This is of particular interest to me because several years ago I took a couple rounds of antibiotics to rid myself of H. pylori. At or about that time I started experiencing joint inflammation which has recently blossomed into a full-bore autoimmune disease.
Correlation does not equal causation, of course, but I’d like to learn more about this possible link. Unfortunately, this is an area of medical science where we have many more questions than answers.