i had a gastroscopy recently and one of the milder things they were checking for just in case is a totally normal stomach bacteria called “helicobacter” which, when i looked it up, i found out he is a little guy with little flagella that he uses to dig into your stomach lining so he doesn’t get swept away, and he secretes something that raises the pH around him so he doesn’t die from stomach acid. kinda realised all at once that i always thought of “bacteria” as a completely vague substance, but it’s guys. your body is a temple with a massive congregation.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
every body is a Doom level crawling with lil guys
Cells At Work is a pretty adorable anime about this premise. bacteria are just guys, some of them are fine and some are horrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFe3srrhLdI
this seems rad
it is! there’s also a spin-off series called Cells At Work: Black that takes place in a body with significantly more health issues, with a more violent and desperate (if hopeful) tone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9vyfAbOo6A
cool…
it is cool
if you have the stomach for it, “parasite rex” is an excellent book about additional members of the congregation + the adaptations they need for their lives + the process of humans even figuring all that out
The human microbiome is a wondrous thing. Helicobacter pylori is also pretty neat. My mother was a pathologist all her life, and she remembers that they’d see these little guys, along with the hundreds of other little folks wandering around in your gut. They’re really obvious little things – the “helico” refers to their spiral shape. (you know, like “helico-pters” which yes is split that way – “pter” means “wing”, there’s no such thing as a “copter”)
The pathologists were focusing on gastric ulcers, which were a huge bane of people in the 70s and 80s, where the body was somehow getting out of balance, producing too much of one sort of stomach acid, and eating itself from the inside. This causes ulcers, and this damage has to be repaired by rapid cell division, and that leads to cancer. A LOT of cancer – this was a huge problem. Exactly why this imbalance in the stomach acid happened was unclear and the best diagnosis was thought to be due to “stress” or “spicy food” or other poorly-defined things.
And when it happened, all sort of critters in the stomach also went out of balance, and helicobacter seemed to breed very well in these too-acidic situations. So it was a fairly decent diagnostic aid – you see more helicobacter, and that’s a sign of stress, and so you put them on proton-pump inhibitors, various anti-stress medications, you sent them to counseling and therapy, they “downsize” their life, stop eating curry, etc. The problem is none of this worked very well, and people kept getting stomach cancer.
And then some Aussies suggested we had it all the wrong way round. Helicobacter wasn’t a SIGN of stomach ulcers, it was the CAUSE. This was loopy when they first suggested it, because everybody has them, and pathologists saw them all the time in perfectly healthy people. And there had never been cases where bacteria caused cancer before – it was a wild suggestion. But honestly – nobody had better ideas for treatment of “stress ulcers”, and the treatment was pretty simple – antibiotics. And over the years it turned out they were dead on. Also we discovered it is certain specific types of helicobacter – most of them are perfectly happy chappies – leave them alone.
My mother was absolutely kicking herself – and so was every other pathologist. They looked at them every day, and they knew the correlation between illness and lots of these critters. But until 1983 nobody had a plausible way to reverse the arrow of causation – that somehow these critters were CAUSING the body to do all sorts of weird things to itself.
Anyway that’s how most gastric cancers got solved in just a decade by… uh… antibiotics. Wild.
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