The Bacterium

When I was twenty-four I injured myself on a film set that led to some strained muscles, at the time though I was misdiagnosed by my doctor as having some sort of bacterial infection; to which he prescribed anti-biotics. There was no infection so the anti-biotics had no affect on the pain I was going through and when I went to a second Doctor he looked over my file and noticed that my regular doctor wrote out that it was a bacterial infection… so without doing any sort of culture I was given more powerful anti-biotics and sent home.

This went on for about a month and a half until I went to see a Doctor suggested to me by a friend, he was an elderly Man from Ireland who spent most of his working years around farmers. I gave him my history of pain, he checked me over and diagnosed me with several latin words… then told me that it was an injury farmers get a lot jumping off the Tractor. I followed his instructions and was walking around properly inside of two weeks.

That month and half on Anti-biotics taught me a lot about stomach biotics, and gave me a new fear of wondering if my body is home to anti-biotic resistant everything.

I had learned in highschool that the human body has billions of bacteria and microbes living both on the skin and inside the digestive track, and as my Biology Teacher put it “If you erase all of them from existence you would die a slow and painful death.” That month I learned the hard way just how important those bacteria and microbes were.

I developed a growth of yeast on various parts of my body… no, they’re not yeast infections, I’m a man so we have more manly names for yeast infections… jock itch, athletes foot, thrush…manly versions of yeast. Without bacteria to keep the yeast in check it grew, and it grew fast.

Then came the digestive problems, apparently you need bacteria in your gut to help break down your food properly to absorb it; otherwise your body doesn’t use it and sends it rushing out of your body at an alarming rate.

For those facing the same issues, we discovered that if you eat a lot of yogurt and milk related products it puts the bacteria back into the system; which helps as long as you don’t suffer from Lactose Intolerance.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the bacteria that lives inside your body, and our knowledge of how it symbiotically functions with us; although in the last year several hypothesis have started forming in the scientific community.

Some, like the Bacteria discovered fifteen years ago to have caused ulcers instead of stress, has moved onto the treatment phase; while others are still evolving… such as bacteria’s role in depression and anxiety, it’s role in fighting off other diseases or causing specific ones.

We’re just scraping the surface now.

This is where the Microbiome Immunity Project comes into play. It’s currently starting it’s first phase using donated computer time to identify the shapes of protein that different bacteria in the gut create; as stated on their page this is how they know what the protein does.

The hope is that by identifying what proteins are acting in the body they can design drugs that can treat illness before they start, treating the cause rather than just the symptoms.

I’m hoping that if you have a thing for Bacteria, healthy or unhealthy, that you’d be able to donate your computer time to the Boinc project, and start working on the World Community Grid; you can find it at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

As an added incentive they’ll also pay you for your computer time using Gridcoin, I love Gricoin… you can download it at http://www.gridcoin.us/