Are Parasites Good for Us?
Dr. Joel Weinstock believes that intestinal worms may be key to preventing asthma, hay fever, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other immunological diseases. One man actually flew to Cameroon and walked around in open cesspits in order to be infested with hookworms (which seems rather insane to me).
The idea got me thinking though: scientists were at one point horrified at the idea of bacteria living inside us; the goal of medicine became to annihilate them utterly. But then it turned out that rather a lot of bacteria are good for us—that in fact the bacteria inside each of us outnumber our bodies’ cells. Some folks (e.g. me) even go out of their way to eat probiotic foods like cheese, sauerkraut, kimchee, kombucha and beer. I wonder if maybe someday we’ll discover that multicellular organisms can be good too, that our bodies are actually complex environments where even parasites have a role to play.
That said, I am not planning on getting hookworms. That seems beyond extreme.
