Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge: Naked World
Porn snafu
Larry Flynt accidentally sends smut to skateboarding fans.
By Jack Boulware
[05/04/00]

Urge: Naked World
Suckling monkeys
The women of a tribe in the Amazon jungle breast-feed small primates and other animals.
By Jack Boulware
[05/03/00]

Talking dirty
Bring on the germs. Too much cleanliness may be making some people sick. First of two parts.
By Susan McCarthy
[05/03/00]

Urge: Naked World
A royal trap
The former Miss Topless Belgium and others are sentenced for setting up Princess Stephanie's hubby with a tryst that ended their marriage.
By Jack Boulware
[05/02/00]

Urge
Snacking
If only women would trust men's genuine desire to give oral sex, instead of presuming it's all about intercourse.
By Dylan Edwards
[05/02/00]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Dr. Joel Weinstock, a parasitologist and director of the Center for Digestive Diseases at U.I., who is the lead researcher in this study, describes how the history of Crohn's disease, one form of IBD (the other is ulcerative colitis), led investigators to this strange therapy.

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammation of the intestines. It hurts like crazy and causes diarrhea, bleeding and fevers. Children with Crohn's often don't grow as tall as they otherwise might because it interferes with uptake of nutrients. It is treated with only partial success with a variety of drugs; sometimes parts of the bowel are surgically removed, but this treatment isn't a cure.

Crohn's was recognized as a disease only in the 1930s, Weinstock notes. "The first cases were reported in New York City in well-to-do Jewish families in young children. Gradually people became aware that there was Crohn's disease in whites who were not Jewish, though at a much lower frequency." By the 1950s, the disease was becoming more common, particularly in northern states. It was seen in cities, but not in rural areas. The same patterns held true in Europe.

Before the 1970s, Weinstock says, IBD was commonly viewed as a disease that afflicted only white people. "African-Americans would never get it, and if you saw a case you could write it up [for publication]. But then we began to see lots of cases by the 1970s in African-Americans, which suggested that the epidemiology of this disease has been developing, evolving and spreading."

The U.S. North-South gradient is no longer evident, Weinstock says, because people in the South are now getting it. What's more, "Israel doesn't have a high rate -- it's intermediate -- but the Arab kids don't have it." And rates are "epidemic" in Japan and South Korea. Explains Weinstock: "What's unique about these countries? They're industrializing. They're becoming wealthy." The answer thus seems to lie not in genetics but in a changing environment.

Obviously, hundreds of things change as a country becomes wealthier, but Weinstock's money is on cleanliness (too much of it) and specifically worms (not enough of them).

Humans, Weinstock notes, "traditionally evolved to live more like in the underdeveloped countries, closer to the soil, closer to our animals. We didn't evolve as creatures that live in sterile rooms, eating sterile food, with our children playing in plastic playgrounds at the mall, playing with animals that have been dewormed."

Kids, in fact, used to have worms all the time, too: pinworms, whipworms, roundworms. "If you look at the public health data, up until the 1930s most children had these worms," Weinstock says. "Of children between the ages of 3 and 12, 70 percent had it [pinworms and trichuras] in their [gastrointestinal] tract at any one time. It's the same in undeveloped countries today."

Of the group of worms called helminths, Weinstock says, "if you just trace the decline of helminths, you see a direct inverse correlation: You see the rise of IBD -- Crohn's disease. In any society where you're getting rid of worms, you can see IBD emerging."

Tests in mice showed that when they were infected with helminths, they were protected from experimentally induced IBD. Excited by this finding, the Iowa team got permission to work with a few human volunteers. They found a "very nice helminth," Trichuras suis, the pig whipworm, which normally lives in pigs and doesn't reach adulthood when it's put in humans. And "it can't be spread to your children." The team produced a line of helminths that was pathogen-free and gave six volunteers with IBD a drink containing microscopic helminth eggs. "We picked patients who were resistant to all forms of treatments," Weinstock says.

Next page | Don't let a kid play with a raw chicken in the dirt