'Cause they sure give ME ulcers!
This is good news to me. Hope someone follows through pretty soon to cure those other things. I take antibiotics every day for Crohn's. I'd love to eliminate it altogether, though keeping it in check is good!
Thank you to these great scientists for finding the cure to ulcer disease. How many people suffered through all the centuries with this painful, deadly malady? And how many were told, "it's all in your head"?
Perhaps they are right about the auto-immune diseases being set off by a bacteria in a prepared environment. That would be an astonishing breakthrough and would help so many sufferers!
Very worthy prize winners. An excellent choice in my mind.
(Note the Nobel prize in Medicine is handed out by the Swedish Nobel foundation - unlike the Peace prize which is handled by the Norwegian Parliament, just so you know!)
Ancient ancestors had tummy bug too
22:00 04 November 2002
NewScientist.com news service
Gaia Vince
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences The stomach-infesting bacterium Helicobacter pylori has been living in humans for at least 11,000 years - much longer than previously thought, say US researchers.
A team at New York University analysed bacterial DNA present in stomach biopsies taken from two groups of Venezuelan volunteers of different ethnic origin. The first was an urban group of European or mixed ancestry. The second was an Amazonian group from an isolated population of indigenous Amerindians.
The researchers found H. pylori present in all the samples. But those in the urban group had a Western European genetic variation, whilst those in the Amazonian group had an East Asian strain.
This provides strong evidence that the bacterium was present in the emigrating population of Asians believed to have crossed the Bering Strait 11,000 years ago to colonise the Americas. The bug would then have been transmitted down through the generations in the indigenous population.
"H. pylori has been living in the human gut for a minimum of 11,000 years, but probably far longer," says Martin Blaser, professor of microbiology, who led the research.
Beneficial effects
Previously, it was believed that the Europeans introduced H. pylori to the Americas at the time of Columbus in the 15th Century. There is also evidence from Egyptian mummies that H pylori infected people about 1800 years ago.
The bacterium is associated with the development of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer, raising the question of how a damaging bug has persisted in humans for so long.
But Blaser told New Scientist: "More than 90 per cent of people with H. pylori never get ulcers or stomach cancer and anyway these diseases only occur after reproductive age, so they do not effect natural selection."
He believes his work suggests H. pylori infection may even have some beneficial effects.
"Over the last century as people have become cleaner and antibiotics have become widespread, the reduction in H. pylori has led to an increase in diarrhoeal diseases and oesophageal cancer," he says. "So it is possible that H. pylori is good for the oesophagus and bad for the stomach."
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.242574599)
and too think only a few years ago...they were called...
tin foil heads...
They treated my Dad with anti-biotics for his ulcers just a couple of years ago as a result of this discovery. But there was something about only being able to test for the bacteria once. Or only being able to treat it once and then not being able to have an accurate test again later. Something like that. Either way, they cured him.
I think it is often overlooked that it is possible to have stomach ulcers that are not caused by H. Pylori.
Well deserved, an excellent choice. And what a God-send their work and discovery was for so many, many people.
It took the medical community over a decade to accept the simple, obvious, easily repeatable evidence of this. Now you can understand why cancer is being treated at half a trillion a year in expenditure.
As an aside, I have thought that the connection between lung cancer and smoking isn't so much the smoke, as it is the damage caused by more frequent bacterial and viral infections of the lung tissue. Some correlations could be exposed perhaps through surveys, but smoking is so PC ridden this even though will not be explored. Just as stomach cancer/ulcer connection had the punishing vice whiff of alcoholism.
Then there is the power of the dollar, or as Chris Rocks says, "There isn’t no money in the cure, it's in the comeback. Nothing's been cured since Polio."
Worked for me. Should have gotten the award earlier.
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Thanks for posting this, there is a technical description at
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1495572/posts
Now why wouldn't this have gotten noticed sooner by another way: that people taking antibiotics for some other reason suffered far fewer stomach ulcers?
Part of the quick fix, big bucks, medical establishment. I presume there won't be much long term difference between a placebo and antibiotics. For sure antibiotics will work better in the short run but in the long run only difficult life style and diet changes are going to prevent the weaknesses that allow the bacteria to gain a foothold.
The pair’s claims provoked a fierce backlash from the medical establishment, which held to the dogma that ulcers were brought on by stress and lifestyle, and could not be cured.I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
-Michael Crichton, lecturing at Cal Tech.
-Eric
"You can hear them clank when he walks down the hall."
Makes me wonder what else (arthritis and other autoimmune diseases
come to mind) the medical establishment would rather treat, than cure......
Kudos to these Aussie researchers.
A backwoods West Virginia Doctor cured my Grandfather of ulcers with a several weeks regimen of sauerkraut juice and goat's milk. The Doc claimed that it balanced the bacteria in the gut which caused ulcers.
That was sometime between 1910 and 1915.