A friend of mine and I were having a “What If” discussion under the influence last night. We really went down some strange avenues. We were both recalling being made fun of in elementary school for having “cooties.” Through a convoluted conversation we ended up questioning the following scenario:
What if you had a magic wand that could instantly kill off any microorganism living on or in your body? If you used it on yourself, what would happen to you?
I maintain that you would die painfully. Bacteria are essential to digestion and I think you would end up with a really bad case of constipation or a fatal case of the Hershey Squirts. But what else would happen? What other biological processes depend on bacteria or other foreign organisms?
Since nobody else has offered anything, I’ll take a run at it.
Warning: not med student, or anything else. But PASSIONATELY interested in How Things Work in living things. One year of university biology … and lots of home study.
My SWAG is that yes you would die eventually, and probably from the constipation thing, unless you radically changed your diet. Or possibly terminal acne, the skin mites feed on sebaceous oils and skin fragments, theoretically helping keep the pores clear.
Of course, I have NO idea about the kids born with no immune system and how that works . . . if they have their intestinal flora and fauna by the time they are diagnosed or what.
That’s my guess and I’m sticking to it - for now, anyways.
I wonder if you would die, though. It seems to me that your body would start getting “reinfected” pretty much immediately.
People often get diarrhea when they take antibiotics because of the death of intestinal bacteria, but they don’t usually die. People with Irritable Bowel Syndrome have diarrhea every day for years, but it doesn’t kill them.
I should point out that cooties are not imaginary microorganisms. They are body lice. I would expect that only a tiny fraction of children accused of having them really do.
Leukocytes aren’t really foreign micro-organisms. Your body produces them.
Although, some of the current speculation about how they came to be does involve some sort of parasitization aeons ago.
And reinfection does occur after heavy antibiotic use, but I don’t remember the vectors. I was taking a run at it assuming that reinfection did not occur.
Dunno really. Awaiting further enlightenment by somebody who really does know for sure . . .
The antibiotics also don’t entirely wipe out the normal flora - they just drastically reduce it. If your normal flora was entirely wiped, I’m not really sure what would happen. If you survived, you would get reinfected, but probably with different strains of bacteria, and that might not be good for you either.
Well, one thing that could happen if your normal microflora was wiped out is colonization by microorganisms that aren’t natural to your body. Human and bacteria have co-evolved together. The stuff that’s in your body is normal and provides benefits like breaking down foodstuff for which we have no digestive enzymes; they also keep out ‘bad’ microorganisms. Foriegn bacteria in you body leads to disease.
First of all, you would lose weight. Your gut alone is something like 1% (too lazy to look up the actual numbers) E. coli. That doesn’t include the other guys in there that are know’s as ‘commensials’. Those are bacteria that take up space, but don’t actually bother you and you don’t bother them. Then there are the commensials on your skin Staphyloccous and the like. So losing these guys would cause you to lose…let’s say 2% of your body weight.
There is a debate raging on whether commensials in your gut actually do anything to help you digest, but let’s say they don’t (for the sake of argument).
After your weight loss you’d probably feel fine for a day or two. Then the opportunistic pathogens would come in. These are bacteria that take up the niche of the commensials. If you’re healthy, (other than killing off all of your microorganisms) you might be able to fight them off for a couple of days, but they would take hold eventually.
You’d probably spike a fever. That would be you immune system kicking into high gear. Then. depending on which illness you get, let’s assume you got it from food or drinking water, you’d get diarrhea (the common side effect of most food poisoning) and feel miserable.
Let’s assume that you still have a pretty good immune system, so you fend off most of the pathogens. Eventually, you’d just go back to the status quo, and have bunches of bugs all over, and inside of you.
I’m just a lowly microbiologist though, so you might have to get a M.D. to verify.
I think (though like I said I’m no M.D.), that this is a bit of the scenario if you have chemotherapy.
If we’re barring all reinfection forever and ever, you’d probably be OK. As has been said, there’s some debate over whether you really need any of your normal flora. It is known that some vitamin K, for instance, is made by bacteria in the gut, but you could probably get enough from food, especially if you made a point of it.
Experiments have been done with animals where they have been raised to never come in contact with any microorganisms - sterile birth through C-section, raised in a plastic bubble, sterilized food, etc. There’s a big fancy name for that, but I don’t remember what it is. AFAIK, they do just fine. However, their immune system is typically almost useless. Never having been exposed to any foreign antigen, they’re not protected against anything. Take them out of the bubble and they die pretty quickly.
If we’re allowing reinfection, well, you’re screwed. Diarrhea has been mentioned several times. Antibiotic associated diarrhea comes about because the antibiotics kill off E. coli, say. With less competition, other bacteria that have been around but suppressed can flourish and cause bacteria. Similar things could happen in the upper digestive tract, the respiratory tract, etc, etc.
Apparently the effects of having no or the wrong bacteria are bad enough that some doctors are experimenting with tranfusions from healthy people. Somehow I’m not expecting the blood-drive people to get in on this.