Both my children have Crohn’s. I would think, that if hookworms were a real viable solution to the problem, it would be mentioned more.
My kids’ docs have never mentioned using such a treatment. While hookworms aren’t “new”, the use in treatment is relatively new. I would hesitate to put my kids through this for something that the ramifications aren’t clearly known.
With gut problems already, it just seems outrageous to think about introducing a bug INTO the gut to fix it. Just doesn’t seem possible.
I have a hard time believing that Crohn’s can be chalked up to too much cleanliness. My brother has it. He spent his childhood eating pillbugs and playing king of the mountain on piles of fertilizer (the manure kind).
Crohn’s doesn’t develop in a forty year old because he or she keeps a clean house.
According to the research cited further up in this thread it is a lack of exposure to certain bacteria, viruses and helminths throughout childhood that appears to be the cause.
Your brother sounds like he had a fun and messy childhood, but he grew up in a culture that eliminated helminths almost fifty years before he was playing in the manure pile. And, that manure pile was animal manure, not human manure. Big difference from the point of view of your immune system.
It isn’t just about getting dirty, it is the kind of dirt and when and for how long you are dirty.
Children in the industrialized world with many siblings, or who grow up on farms, are far less likely to get hay fever, asthma, crohn’s, colitis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, migraine and psoriasis.
Introducing sewers was an enormous change from the point of view of our immune systems. Is it such a stretch to accept that such a change might have had unintended consequences?
interesting. i didn’t pick up any sense of ickiness before this post… but i’d rather be in fear factor than face a pack of invisible ninja worms armed with hooks boring through my skin :eek:
I am betting venereal diseases from sexual tourism, including HIV are worse.
Remember, hookworm are very benign, they are only a problem in the host suffers from malnutrition, and only then with a very large infection numbering in the high hundreds or thousands.
Therapeutic doses range from as few as 10 for asthma to as high as 50-76 for Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis respectively. The health risk to the host in this case is zero. Refer to the study from Nottingham I reference earlier in this thread, a Proof of Concept Study…
One of those consequences being that most of us don’t die before the age of 30 of typhus, so now we have more time to be concerned about diseases that don’t wipe out double-digit portions of the population.
There’s a Wikipedia page? Well then it must be legit, for God’s sake! Anything that gets a mention on a website that absolutely anybody can edit, must be on the up and up. I’m convinced.
Speaking as a former sufferer of ulcerative colitis, I would have swallowed whatever eggs they gave me. What is the problem here? It’s not even icky. It’s not like you have to swallow whole, wriggling worms.
So far, I have seen no reason to believe that this treatment works. The wikipedia article is not very good. It leaves me skeptical. The two studies that are linked are very small scale. The first one is a joke, since 15 of the 14 patients were on immunosuppresive therapy in addition to the worms. At least the second study is placebo controled, but I hardly think that one small scale study warrants anything but more research. The asthma study gives no way to verify the results, you just have to accept that the study was unbiased. Based on the way that wikipedia article is written, I wouldn’t take anything at face value.
As for the Hygene Hypothesis, it’s just that, a hypothesis. It is likely to be a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Hopefully it will lead to some good therapies.
If you want to infect yourself with worms, don’t let me stop you. I find the evidence of any benifit presented so far to be dubious.
You would lose your money. Hookworm IS the No-1 health problem in the southern region. There’s not much sex tourism in the South, certainly not as much as in Bangkok and Pattaya. Phuket and Hua Hin have small bar scenes, and Malaysian men make use of Hat Yai, but the vast majority of Thais in the South have nothing at all to do with that. (Most bargirls are transients from the Northeast anyway.) Do you even know Thailand’s HIV rate, or are you just assuming all Thais are prostitutes?
Especially in the farther reaches of the South, it’s a Muslim area. The three southernmost provinces have been involved in an insurgency against the government for 3 1/2 years now, with 2000 killed, and there’s not much tourism going on in that area at all at the moment.
I’ll help you out. This website gives the adult HIV infection rate as 1.4% for Thailand as a whole. This jives with government figures I’m familiar with. The rate is actually lower in the South (the North and Northeast have the highest rates).
Meanwhile, this website gives one example of a government study conducted by the Faculty of Tropical Medicine at Mahidol University, which is also the top institute for public-health-related issues. The study investigated several schools in Nakhon Si Thammarat province in the South. Note the part that says:
“The results showed that 23.7% of schoolchildren in Wat Krou Chou and 24.7% of those in Wat Thang Phoon were infected with soil-transmitted helminths, with a 24.1% overall infection rate. The major infection was hookworm (22.2% and 19.6%) and the minor one was trichuriasis, (2.9% and 8.7% respectively). The intensity of infection was similar in both schools, 85.7% and 90.2% respectively for light intensity hookworm.”
This also jives with figures I’ve seen for the region as a whole. This not being the Pit, I’m not allowed to say exactly what I think about someone who comes up with: “Oh, it’s Thailand, so surely the HIV from sex is higher.” But I will say the tiny amount of credibilty the OP had has vanished as far as I’m concerned.
Siam Sam didn’t insult you; he said, because of what you’ve said so far, you lack credibility. You’re welcome to disagree with him and prove him wrong, but without the insults.
Regardless of that, though, if you feel someone had insulted you, be sure to report the post, and do not respond with an insult.
I will say, however, Siam Sam, that claiming you have something worse to say about someone, but won’t because we’re not in the Pit, does little more than degrade the discussion. It’s probably better to either share your views in a new Pit thread, or just go along with the discussion without hinting at insults.
So as to not hijack this thread any further, any more discussion about this should be confined to the Pit, our place for discussion of moderator action.
On further thought, this belongs in either Great Debates or General Question. Glancing through the thread, it looks as if it’s shifted slightly toward GD, so I’ll move it there.