And another interesting article... "Is Dirt the New Prozac?"
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/raw-data-is-dirt-the-new-prozac/?searcht...
And another:
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Eat worms - feel better
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Full article here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3287733.stm
Anna drinks worm eggs as a treatment
Who would deliberately drink a dose of gut worms? The answer is Anna Glanz, an ordinary mother-of-two from Iowa.
She's testing the remarkable theory that not all parasites are necessarily bad for us. Some of them may actually help us fight diseases.
A BBC documentary looks at how some parasites are so well-adapted to using humans as hosts, that when you take them away, there are unexpected results.
Ulcerative colitis is a disease of the intestine caused by the immune system over-reacting - in this disease the white blood cells attack the gut as though it's a foreign invader, making it bleed.
Mother-of-two, Anna Glanz, from Iowa, suffers from it and gets terrible cramps and sudden, intense attacks of diarrhoea.
The disease is incurable, but she is now taking part in an experimental trial run by Dr Joel Weinstock, a specialist in bowel disorders.
He's giving her worms to try to treat the disease.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3287733.stm
: "Worms require humans to survive. In essence the worms are part of us and it's possible that we've become interdependent and removing worms has resulted in an imbalance to our immune systems.
"People have what I consider an irrational fear of worms. Nobody wants to go to the toilet and look into the toilet and see something wiggle".
Another person feeling the benefit of a worm infestation is academic researcher Alan Brown, who picked up hookworms while on a field-trip outside the UK.
The worm hangs around damp earth or water droplets, and on contact with skin burrows through and heads for the gut.
There it attaches itself to the wall - and drinks blood to live.
However, in western countries, where people are well-nourished, a moderate infestation is likely to have no nasty side-effects at all.
Dr Brown examines his own faeces under the microscope to try to gauge how many worms currently reside within him.
"Given the number of eggs there, there's about 300 hookworms in my guts."
However, there's a useful effect - his hayfever has virtually disappeared, and now he is working on the powers of the hookworm with a view to developing an asthma drug.
He said: "My wife's horrified - she's totally convinced that one day I'm going to infect the whole family."