Helminthic therapy might be able to cure disease through the deliberate infection of patients with p
Helminthic therapy might be able to cure disease through the deliberate infection of patients with parasites, particularly intestinal ones. You may have heard, as per the hygiene hypothesis, that those in the developed world suffer from a slew of autoimmune diseases because they aren’t exposed to pathogens and parasites enough. Without exposure to these troublemakers, it has been suggested that our immune systems don’t develop correctly. Hence, a lot of us suffer from food allergies, hay fever, asthma and more serious conditions such as multiple sclerosis whilst these same diseases are much more rare in the developing world. This is where the parasites come in. In a method quite similar to inoculation, people who simply don’t see many pathogens and parasites in their day-to-day life are intentionally infected with Helminths, a group of parasitic worm-like organisms. Doing so has been studied to help damp an overactive immune system and restore normality to people suffering from chronic allergies and more. Helminthic therapy is not a wide-stream medical practice and perhaps never will be, but research is ongoing to find out how techniques using these tiny infectious organisms might help us cope with a cleaner world in the future. Above: an image of hookworms, tiny parasites included among the Helminths. They take about a week to reach the small intestine after burrowing through human feet. Source here. -- source link
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