Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Starting To Die Off 260
Dr_Ken writes with a quote from Scientific American:
"The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing? With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment—which is still largely uncharacterized—most of these rapid changes are not yet understood. 'This is the next frontier and has real significance for human health, public health and medicine,' says Betsy Foxman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. 'They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have,' Foxman says."
I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
am saddened by the death of our microbial overlords (or underlords as the case may be).
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Dumb logic (Score:3, Insightful)
No antibiotics for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor. I'll bet most of the people who are missing these microbes have been exposed to a lot of antibiotics. This may also explain why staph infections are turning deadly, and I know it's why Western kids have lots of strange allergies.
The Hadza are the last hunter gatherers in the world, probably. They seem to be doing alright. (Not saying I'd give up my lifestyle, but there are lessons to be learned.)
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text [nationalgeographic.com]
Re:No antibiotics for me (Score:5, Informative)
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor.
I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
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I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
And yet, if you go early enough, good luck convincing a doctor to run those tests for your non-specific tiredness and pains.
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You don't have the concept of routine annual medical checkups?
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"You don't have the concept of routine annual medical checkups?"
Routine annual checkups are, generally speaking, a waste of money. Widespread screening for uncommon disease leads to overtreatment. Overtreatment not only wastes money but it can harm (and kill) you. This should not be confused with a diagnostic test.
The really difficult part is finding a proper balance. Breast cancer is a good example. For people with no risk factors, routine screening over 50 is a good idea (Costs and harms of screen
Yes, let me restate for the hopelessly stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, for all of the hopelessly stupid people out there. If you feel like you are sick and you don't have a cold, go to a doctor to find out what it is. If your lymph nodes stay swollen for some reason, go to the doctor. If you have unexplainable pain, go to the doctor. When you get to a certain age, turn and cough. However, if you come down with the sniffles, suck it up and don't run to get Tamiflu and antibiotics shoved up your ass just because.
Christ almighty. I hope they never take the warning labels off small electronics. Otherwise you'll probably end up trying to use your Bagelator in the bathtub.
Pushing your neighbor off the cliff. (Score:2)
I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
You could say the say the same for hundreds of other life-threatening conditions. Swine Flu among them. But the contagious disease makes you a danger to everyone.
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I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
Yes, but 95% of the time the Doctor tells you it's just a mole. Even if 10% of the time it's cancer.
People need to be more aware of their bodies. Started feeling shitty a year ago? Got strange moles popping up? You need to get them looked at - and be extremely pushy if your Doctor is apathetic.
My mother got warned by her Chiropractor that her moles looked cancerous. She went to her doctor and bullied him into referring to a specialist. Two malignant melanomas later - thankfully cut out in time - she seems t
Re:No antibiotics for me (Score:5, Insightful)
About a fifth of all [Hadza] babies die within their first year, and nearly half of all children do not make it to age 15.
That may be your ideal, but for me there are advantages to modernity.
Idolizing the Hadza is like those people who never take their pets to the vet, because the animals don't go to the vet in the wild. It's true animals don't go to the vet in the wild, but they also have shorter life spans.
Interesting article, btw. Glad you posted it. But doctors do good things.
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I have thought about the allergies thing, and whilst it might be that the sterile environments lead to increased allergies, it might just be that back in the day, we didn't test for allergies, so we had lots of unexplained deaths in infants. Nowadays, kids are assessed for allergies pretty much on birth, so we can avoid exposing them to allergens rather earlier, and thus there is the appearance of an allergy epidemic.
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The reason why staph infections can be worse now then in the past is two fold. The first is because hospitals are pushed to be super-clean environments. This first part allows very hardy bacteria to thrive where they normally wouldn't. The second is when antibiotics are given, a lot of people don't take them to the full duration. This second part causes a lot of issues as people are building on top of the chain.
As well the prevelence of anti-bacterial hand washes/wipes/dish soaps/etc are highly damaging
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Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor
What about cancer, cavities, hypertension and such?
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Funny, a family friend of ours, who contracted antibiotic resistant staph in his spinal column following surgery, would tend to disagree, given he had to lay there for quite some time with open wounds that had to be debrided and drained. Thank god vancomycin-resistant staph is still fairly uncommon, as otherwise the infection may have killed him.
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It's not. I missed the point. But thanks for being the third poster to point it out. I wonder who the fourth will be?
I, for one... (Score:2)
regret the defeat of our former microbial underlords.
mother nature (Score:5, Insightful)
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this is why we need to let our children interact with other people and go out and play in the dirt.
Common sense would also suggest we should let them play with animals as well as dirt. It's the adults who didn't have any pets as kids that suffer from pet allergies.
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I had TB & polio as a kid, and when I was hospitalized I acquired a massive staff infection with huge open sores, all this BEFORE the widespread adoption of penicillin! I was moved to Kings county general where I was given massive doses of the (then) fairly new antibiotic.
In short, don't knock modern medicine, your grandparents who didn't have it suffered terribly without it!
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we now live in a world with Sissies who can't take life's discomforts like there parents.
Apparently, they also cannot spell like their parents did, either.
Re:mother nature (Score:5, Informative)
this is why we need to let our children interact with other people and go out and play in the dirt. I did and let me tell you, I do still get sick but not as much as some of my friends who had lived sheltered lives with there parents who thought that every little cold they got they would need to go to the doctors to be treated for it. we now live in a world with Sissies who can't take life's discomforts like there parents.
Exactly.
People are too clean these days. It sounds stupid, but it's true. Folks need to go outside and play with some animals, socialize, fall in the dirt, scrape their knees, and get on with life. It's good for you! It helps build up your immune system.
Got to your local supermarket or WalMart or whatever... Take a look through their kitchen goods - absolutely everything has some kind of anti-microbial agent built-in. I'm not suggesting we all go lick some raw chicken... But a few germs are actually good for us. And sterilizing everything is not.
Look through the bath section... All the soaps are antimicrobial as well. All of them. Just getting yourself clean isn't enough... You have to nuke whatever critters might be around.
And, not only are we nuking anything and everything that we might be exposed to - thereby robbing ourselves of a chance to build up an immunity... But we're also flooding the environment with these antibiotic/antimicrobial substances - giving those very critters plenty of opportunities to develop their own immunities.
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washing your hands with (regular) soap and hot water was almost no different than washing your hands with anti-bacterial soap in terms of killing bacteria.
So you could look at it another way, then. If washing your hands gets rid of more bacteria than the supposed antimicrobial agent, then all the people complaining about the supposed evils of antimicrobial soaps are falling for a red herring. If antimicrobial agents aren't really what's getting rid of the bacteria, then antimicrobial agents can't be creating this race of super-bacteria that people suppose they are (or whatever the fear is about). Rather, they're just a marketing gimmick designed to sell soap.
They're very useful... (Score:4, Insightful)
The presence of neutral microbes offers resource competition against random microbes taking up residence, especially harmful ones.
Since there is competition, new Microbes of any sort, are less likely to flourish unchecked, than if there was no competition.
Think of how many computer users would be using MacOS or Linux KDE, if Windows didn't exist, or if Microsoft were to suddenly drop dead and stop making new versions of Windows that were successful at competing for placement on people's computers.
The loss/extinction of some of these neutral, or even beneficials microbes could be quite bad, if it makes humans more vulnerable to spontaneous intrusion by others and digestive system issues.
The less diversity in the neutral microbes... the more likely that a malicious microbe releases one toxin that happens to kill them all.
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No facts (Score:2)
Reading the original article, I notice a complete lack of facts. Were there any statistics about relative declines in gut flora in various populations? Or particular flora that are disappearing.
I find the hypothesis pretty unlikely to be honest, but that can be a good thing in hypothesis... if someone can start presenting some facts to back it up.
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100 Trillion Microbial Cells? (Score:3, Interesting)
That supposed total of 110 trillion cells overall weigh about 150 pounds. Are the microbial cells really something like 1% the weight on average of a human cell? 100 trillion microbial cells seems hard to believe.
Re:100 Trillion Microbial Cells? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they are. See Procaryote [wikipedia.org] vs Eukaryote [wikipedia.org].
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In this cell/microbe zoom [utah.edu], it looks like bacteria are generally smaller than human cells, but not 1%. Viruses are much smaller, though. But they're not "cells".
Re:100 Trillion Microbial Cells? (Score:5, Informative)
Think back to high school, doc. Remember the parts of a human cell?
One of 'em, the mitochondria, is essentially a specially-evovled bacteria used to help your cell produce energy. It's easily less than 1/10th the size of the whole cell. Maybe 1/20th, or even 1/100th, for very big cells.
And not all cells are the same size. You have some cells in your body that stretch for the better part of a yard, and if you're a woman you produce one certain cell every four weeks or so that's almost big enough to be seen with the naked eye.
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I still wasn't sure when I looked at this cell zoom demo [slashdot.org].
Eat at White Castle (Score:3, Funny)
Consuming a few "sliders" will re-populate lots of gastro-intestinal things.
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Great idea, with one minor issue - projectile diarrhea kills more people each year than AIDs.
NOOOOES (Score:3, Interesting)
NOT MY MIDI-CHLORIANS!!
Repopulating in your local microbal ecosystems (Score:2, Interesting)
Soap vs Santizers (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems that most products advertised today pull on the "santize everything you touch" FUD that's out there. I work at a large technology company, and they recently installed automated hand sanitizers by every external door. I read an article recently that claimed that EMC was having cleaning crews sanitize every doorknob in their campus once a week.
This isn't just a corporate activity, I've got a friend with a 5yr old son in that the son has been conditioned to ask mom for Purel every 5-10 minutes. I also find it funny that kids are being taught to eat a McDonald's burger by holding the wrapper. The funny part is that the people making the burgers aren't wearing gloves...
Reminds me of the old joke: A Harvard and MIT student, both just finished using the urinal and the MIT student walks towards the door. The Harvard student says, "Hey, at Harvard they teach us to wash our hands after using the urinal!" The MIT student fires back, "At MIT they teach us not to pee on our hands!"
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And the Air Force guy says "They didn't need to teach us that. We learned that around age 3"
Probiotic supplements (Score:2)
In the past we got a lot of the microbacteria that our bodies need from our food supply. With the invention of herbacides, fertilizers and various other modern farming "advancements", the food supply has become less diverse. The digestive system is one of the first lines of defense for the immune system. Anyone who is concerned about their digestive health can start with a good probiotic supplement. I like Jarrow Labs EPS probiotic. There are many others on the market though.
Re:Probiotic supplements (Score:5, Funny)
more fun than eating dirt: mud wrestling with members of the opposite sex (or same sex, if that's the way you roll)
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The side dishes and details of preparation and presentation are entirely up to the individual.
Time to panic!! (Score:2)
We needed another crisis, gotta get that government program in place.. appoint a 'microbe czar'... raise our taxes.. save us!!
Of cycles and balances... (Score:2)
I am someone, who always seeks to find simple rules that describe complex mechanisms and patterns. And if there is one all-encompassing mechanism in nature, that can be described by simple rules, it’s that of the cycles and balances.
In our bodies, as in all of nature.
See, they are complex systems of interacting cycles, that are in perfect balance.
If you change something... anything... no matter how small it seems... it influences the whole cycle. Then it can create a feedback loop. And it can spread t
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I ran the numbers on the growth rate of a puppy. In 100 years it will be too large for the solar system and will destroy it.
Mostly Harmless (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of bacteria are either harmless or beneficial to their human host. Only a very small number of bacteria are pathogenic, and most of the time your body does a great job keeping those out. Here's a great book for bacteria spotters, amateur and pro, which tells you how to find bacteria without a microscope.
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3864 [cornell.edu]
http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Bacteria-Comstock-Book/dp/0801488540 [amazon.com]
George Carlin thread! (Score:2, Funny)
We swam in the Hudson..." [videosift.com] (video)
R.I.P. funnyman.
I have an evolutionary advantage then.. (Score:2)
I work in IT. We don't bathe too often.
Want to start an irresponsible internet rumor? (Score:2)
By Wednesday, parents will be mixing dirt into cereal and formula in the hopes of increasing microbial ppm.
Codex Alimentarius, it is in the food... (Score:2, Interesting)
What is going on was planned, and it is an old plan.
7 of the 9 deadly persistent poisons are being reintroduced.
Subclinical antibiotics are mandatory for production farm animals.
Watch Food Inc. and know that even it does not cover it all.
The top youtube video has a MD named Rima Laibow talking
about Codex and What it means and it is now law world
wide in over 150 countries.
The warning was sounded years ago.
Proof that what she says has been happening is seen
in the film Reversing Diabetes in 30 days.
We are all
The Five-Second Rule... (Score:5, Funny)
...now has scientific backing. Go ahead, pick up that chip that fell on the floor and eat it. When someone gives you a look, just tell them you are maintaining a healthy microbial diversity.
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I was thinking the same thing.
There may be a downside to all this though, from what I understand of digestion and our immune system, it seems to me that when you lose X amount of microbes then you will end up with more of a different microbe that may breed much faster due to lack of competition.
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Re:If we evolved to have them... (Score:4, Informative)
There was recently a story about how people with a high-fat, high-sugar diet have different microbes in their stomach that allow them to absorb a higher % of calories from those fat/sugar than a more moderate diet. And that it could change as fast as 16 hours - so if you decide to go for yogurt and vegetables one entire day, and then eat a high fat carbohydrate laden meal the next, your body wouldn't absorb nearly as many calaries as it would have if you ate the previous day. Which may hold the key for some weight loss.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1938023,00.html [time.com]
Re:If we evolved to have them... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The problem is that the consequences will never "work out" - change is happening fast and will not slow down, so there will always be new data and new issues to worry about.
Re:If we evolved to have them... (Score:4, Informative)
Well lets see... allergies in the western world are on the rise, and people here tend to rely on medicine to solve sicknesses rather than their immune systems.
I recall hearing that the appendix was a safe haven for some good bacteria. After a purge from antibiotics, it replenishes your gut with the good stuff. Complete speculation, but this decline might leave us with more restricted diets and weaker immune systems in a couple generations.
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Well lets see... allergies in the western world are on the rise, and people here tend to rely on medicine to solve sicknesses rather than their immune systems.
Yeah. I miss the good old days of fixing strep throat with a double-shot of whiskey and stolid manliness.
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God forbid we stop prescribing medicines all willy-nilly when they're not necessary just to quite down parents and belly-achers.
I go to the Doctor when it's serious: i.e., it's not getting better, it's getting worse, it's life-threatening or infected. I do not go to the doctor every time my throat hurts. That's just silly.
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us having evolved to have them would probably indicate that they give some sort of advantage to not having them.
Or that it is not worth the cost of getting rid of them.
In any case, this is one of the most innuendo-laced collections of speculative bullshit /. has linked in a long time, and that's saying something. Everything in the article is prefaced with "may be" and "could be" and "possibly". Well, the Earth may be in danger because it is possible it could be hit by a low-albedo asteroid tomorrow. Does
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We do not need them... We ARE them!
They say that wars, hate and greed will kill humanity.
But I believe, that it’s the human arrogance will kill us.
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A lot of people in here are comparing living to 35 with natural bacteria or living to 100+. In reality it's more of living with natural bacteria or getting severally sick anytime something goes around because you have a weaker immune system. They have already shown that overly clean people tend to raise kids with weaker immune systems, greater chance of auto-immune disorders, allergies, and get sick more often and with worse symptoms.
I guess my answer is I would rather live to 100 with bacteria than be sick
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Some of us didn't have any say in the matter.
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and I always wondered why people cut off the ends of their penis.
They almost never do - even the rare person who willingly does that kind of thing almost always gets someone else to do it.
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"So I for one hope more attention is focused on our little commensural buddies."
We should do for them what we should do for any life form we wish to preserve, which is breed them.
There is no shortage of domestic cattle, but elephants are endangered because humans want to use and eat them yet make little effort to preserve them in quantity.
Re:Bought the tshirt (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to play pedant, but that's a poor analogy. Cattle have been bred to mature quickly; meanwhile the never-fully domesticated Elephants of Africa and India rival humans for their long maturation and gestation periods.
/IANA Micro-biologist
Microbes, on the other hand, are easy to breed in quantity once you have established their optimal developmental environment. Once we work out what we have inside and around us and what we need, we could conceivably tailor our anti-biotic intake based on our inherited and environmental differences.
'Intelligently planned' biotic yoghurt supplements may be the next big thing in preventative health care.
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Industrializing elephants wouldn't work out so well for the creatures we know as elephants today. 10 of the 12 Bovini are either entirely domesticated or highly endangered, and the Bos taurus of which we have a billion are not viable outside of highly controlled artificial conditions which optimize for milk and steak. For related reasons, the species of chicken and swine which we have in abundance wouldn't be worthwhile to preserve if our primary concern is ecological health or diversity.
Fits in with the Hygiene hypothesis (Score:2, Interesting)
The Hygiene hypothesis postulates that the seeming rise in food and other allergies and auto-immune diseases like Crohn's coincides with the rise in hygiene in the developed world.
The immune system evolved in an environment with many more challenges from both symbiotic and parasitic organisms. Excessive hygiene shifts the equilibrium towards the immune system attacking itself.
If fact, Helminthic therapy has shown promise in Crohn's. Infecting patients with parasites or the killed eggs of parasites give the
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe there is a middle road? Reasonable sanitation (ya know, soap up the groin, armpits and feet when showering and all that) but cut out the obsessive stuff. At work we have little things that you can use to spray your hands with antibacterial solution at the exit from stairwells. People take antibiotics "just in case", and so forth.
Maybe less really is more sometimes. I.e. there probably is such a thing as being too clean. No need to swing to the other extreme.
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Maybe less really is more sometimes. I.e. there probably is such a thing as being too clean. No need to swing to the other extreme.
I tend to agree. I am more on the age of thinking, "If i'm not dying(sick in bed), I don't need medicine."
My mother also raised me this way when I was a crawling around on the ground/toddler. Out of my friends I always seem to be the one that doesn't get sick hardly ever. I don't know if that is a trend means I am special. Perhaps I was exposed to more bacteria on a regular basis when I was young, and therefore my immune system grew stronger. Either way, it is an interesting trend.
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Another easy solution! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another easy solution! (Score:5, Informative)
peoples' expected lifespan returns to 35!
When exactly was our lifespan 35?
Or are you just demonstrating that you suck at math?
Here's a mental exercise for you:
Say you have 1000 people. 499 of them die before they turn one year old. 499 of them die at the age of 70. Two of them die at the age of 35.
What is the average lifespan? At what age did most of them die?
Our "average lifespan" has been increasing because we're eliminating infant mortality, not because most people only lived to some ridiculously low age.
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When exactly was our lifespan 35? Or are you just demonstrating that you suck at math? Here's a mental exercise for you: Say you have 1000 people. 499 of them die before they turn one year old. 499 of them die at the age of 70. Two of them die at the age of 35. What is the average lifespan? At what age did most of them die? Our "average lifespan" has been increasing because we're eliminating infant mortality, not because most people only lived to some ridiculously low age.
beyond me how you got modded troll
mod parent up (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent is correct in pointing out this basic failure to recognize the problem with averages in statistics.
In addition, abortions can also be counted as early deaths.
We already save many that would naturally die which has skewed the average even further. If the technology froze, one would expect the average to go down as the genetic defects live long enough to reproduce and increase the defect rates possibly leading to complications medicine can not fully counter.
Just think about it -- a dominant defective trait allowed to continue leads a large demographic of people (or all humans) who have some sort of defect that requires advanced technology to continue the species... The makings of an interesting science fiction story?
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abortions can also be counted as early deaths
Not for the purposes of determining life expectancy.
At the stage abortion is legal, a fetus is not (legally) a human being, and so would not be included in life expectancy calculations.
Actually it's both for average lifespan. (Score:4, Insightful)
But the average longevity is only going up because of fewer early adult deaths. Longevity only considers those that reach adulthood.
Basically you are flat out wrong. The maximum expected age hasn't moved much. The rates of death for all younger years has been going down for many centuries.
The 99th percentile may have always lived about the same length of time. The 50th percentile are living much longer now.
Re:Another easy solution! (Score:4, Insightful)
Our "average lifespan" has been increasing because we're eliminating infant mortality, not because most people only lived to some ridiculously low age.
Life expectancy is always stated with a starting age, e.g. at birth, at age 5, at age 18, etc.
Life expectancy at birth obviously goes up rapidly with lower infant mortality. Life expectancy at age 5 just as obviously depends on other factors. Our current life expectancy at all age levels is the highest it's ever been. In other words, you just demonstrated that you suck at actuarial rates.
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You mean like the average lifespan in Afghanistan was (in the 80s) at 35 (and probably still is)? :)
You can guess the *cough*cold*cough* main *cough*war*cough* reasons for that. ^^
(My father is Afghani, so I think I know this.
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I realize you enjoy posting that, but nobody even implied people only lived to 35. If infant mortality is very high then your expected lifespan (at birth) might indeed be 35. If sanitation is very bad, there is generally very high infant mortality. As we are born with less and less protective bacteria, it is not unreasonable to investigate whether infant mortality might again start to increase.
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The statistical effect of counting medically-induced abortions would be quite minimal compared to that of totting up all
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Any citations? I agree with your argument, but I've only heard it from second hand accounts. Data would be helpful.
You can find some data for the US broken down by age, sex, and (partially) race here. [infoplease.com]
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I see your Norman Borlaug and raise you Thomas Midgley [wikipedia.org] - "Midgley had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history".
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False dichotomy.
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What a profoundly stupid thing to say. Unless they are used to treat a specific life-threatening infection, antibiotics don't prolong your lifespan. And nobody is saying you shouldn't treat your Bubonic plague to protect your E. coli.
So yes, you can stop
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Insightful)
That’s the thing: There is a “too much”. Like with “sanitation“/antibiotics.
You essentially need that massive amount microbes in your digestive system, to digest your food. They are as much a part of you, as your heart or your brain.
If you kill them, you kill yourself!
If you ever had a wrecked digestive system, you know what you are talking about. Not only dose life become really shitty. It even changes your character. And not only as secondary effects. But because your digestive system got just as much neurons as your brain, and the messed up digestion messes with those neurons too.
Just as you got a protective film on your tongue, and on your whole skin.
If you kill them off, you basically lose the firewall and part of your PSU. Good luck withstanding the DDOS and botnet shitstorm and the hurricane outside then...
Sure you can try to recreate protection in form of chemicals and bubble boy bubbles. But what’s the point, if you already got a extremely effective system that’s been in use and improvement since millions, if not billions of years.
Those who do not understand nature are doomed to recreate it. Badly. ^^
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In fact, thanks to evolution, those anti-bacterial products are making stronger bacteria. I personally wouldn't want to have to bathe in bleach so I think we should ban them. The benefit as well is that we can cull some of the weak and have some population control.
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Just go back to nature, eschew all this horrible modern sanitation and antibiotics, they are all poisoning you. Of course you expected lifespan will be changed from ~80 to about 35, but at least you won't be destroying our precious internal ecosystem. Come on, take one for the team!
Brett
So many things wrong with this...
First of all, a large reason our average lifespan is going up is not because everyone is living to 100+. It's because we're eliminating a large amount of infant mortality.
You're also taking an all-or-nothing kind of approach that's simply idiotic. Nobody is suggesting we do away with modern sanitation and antibiotics... But maybe we don't need antibacterial chemicals built into every single object we touch. Maybe we don't need hand sanitizer stationed every 10 feet. May
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You're an anti-nanite aren't you? Bastard.
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So you've had your fillings removed, right?
(and wtf are you doing on slashdot if you think you can be tracked from somewhere else due to "gps".)
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Hey, here is another thing we haven't thought much about. I don't know how it would affect us, but it could be, like, super heavy important.
yeah dude like they have been with us for millions of years and they do lots of stuff we don't know well and there are plenty of interaction effects and... Well I could go on, but there's so much village idiot bait one can take per day.
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Wet mass of an E. Coli cell is about 1 pg (pico-gram), or 10^-12 g. So, 110 trillion cells is about 100g of bacteria (1/5th of a pound); most of those are in your gut, the rest on your skin and mucous membranes. (The insides of your body are sterile for the most part.)
Re: (Score:2)
I take it you never heard the radio ads for "nature's healthy trinity" (an intestinal flora repopulating capsule product consisting of three bacterial lines that you'll find in most brands of yogurt.)
In fact many brands of yogurt contain five beneficial bacterial lines and are a fine way to repopulate your gut if the antibiotics (or "colon cleansing") have thrown the population out of balance.