>>The world we occupy today is very different from the one occupied by our not-so-distant ancestors. As we enter a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene, in which the human footprint has left its mark – there is much concern about global deforestation, melting ice sheets and general biosphere degradation.

But another, often overlooked, casualty of this new epoch is the diversity of microorganisms (including bacteria, viruses and fungi) that live on and in us.<<

>>Living and working among the Hadza makes me think of the intimate relationship humans have probably evolved with diverse groups of microbes. With each animal killed, microbes are given the opportunity to move from one species to the next.

With each berry that is plucked from a bush or tuber dug from beneath the microbial-rich ground, each and every act of foraging keeps the Hadza connected to an extensive regional (microbial) species pool.

It is their persistent exposure to this rich pool of microorganisms that has endowed the Hadza with an extraordinary diversity of microbes; much greater than we see among people in the so-called developed world.<<

https://sciencealert.com/research-suggests-our-microbiome-is-an-ecological-disaster-zone?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1

An interesting and thought provoking read.

Yes. But not for those reasons.

At any time, any one of those organisms in our microbiome could decide to wipe out the human race.

mollwollfumble said:

Yes. But not for those reasons.

At any time, any one of those organisms in our microbiome could decide to wipe out the human race.

Ref?

Witty Rejoinder said:

mollwollfumble said:

Yes. But not for those reasons.

At any time, any one of those organisms in our microbiome could decide to wipe out the human race.

Ref?

For example:

Enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC)
Enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC)
Enteroinvasive E. coli (EIEC)
Enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC)
Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC)
Verotoxin-producing E. coli
E. coli O157:H7
E. coli O104:H4
Escherichia coli O121
Escherichia coli O104:H21
Escherichia coli K1, meningitis
Escherichia coli NC101
Shigella
Shigella flexneri
Shigella dysenteriae
Shigella boydii
Shigella sonnei
…, to name just a few. We had a close call with SARS and AIDS.

Human overpopulation is heaven for the human microbiome.

mollwollfumble said:

…, to name just a few. We had a close call with SARS and AIDS.

Human overpopulation is heaven for the human microbiome.

There’s a big difference between killing millions – even billions – and wiping out an entire species. Are there any examples in the animal kingdom of an entire species being wiped out by disease?

mollwollfumble said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

mollwollfumble said:

Yes. But not for those reasons.

At any time, any one of those organisms in our microbiome could decide to wipe out the human race.

Ref?

For example:

Enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC)
Enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC)
Enteroinvasive E. coli (EIEC)
Enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC)
Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC)
Verotoxin-producing E. coli
E. coli O157:H7
E. coli O104:H4
Escherichia coli O121
Escherichia coli O104:H21
Escherichia coli K1, meningitis
Escherichia coli NC101
Shigella
Shigella flexneri
Shigella dysenteriae
Shigella boydii
Shigella sonnei
…, to name just a few. We had a close call with SARS and AIDS.

Human overpopulation is heaven for the human microbiome.

Maybe via our higher hygiene standards and lack of interaction of new microbes, we reduce the beneficial ones and encourage the bad ones due to the lack of microbial competition. The reduction of other microbes from other sources, would also weaken the existing beneficial genetic diversity, again providing opportunities for the bad microbes, which being more common within the human population would be quick to take advantage.

> There’s a big difference between killing millions – even billions – and wiping out an entire species. Are there any examples in the animal kingdom of an entire species being wiped out by disease?

Not a big difference, and yes. I can’t think of the species off hand, but one Australian small marsupial species was completely wiped out by a disease. The last to die were those within city limits, because the city helped to isolate them from the disease which had killed them all in the wild, but eventually even those in the city got sick and died.

Witty Rejoinder said:

mollwollfumble said:

…, to name just a few. We had a close call with SARS and AIDS.

Human overpopulation is heaven for the human microbiome.

There’s a big difference between killing millions – even billions – and wiping out an entire species. Are there any examples in the animal kingdom of an entire species being wiped out by disease?

Possibly the Christmas Island Rat.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003602

Confined to an Island, unlikely to happen to humans I would think.

poikilotherm said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

mollwollfumble said:

…, to name just a few. We had a close call with SARS and AIDS.

Human overpopulation is heaven for the human microbiome.

There’s a big difference between killing millions – even billions – and wiping out an entire species. Are there any examples in the animal kingdom of an entire species being wiped out by disease?

Possibly the Christmas Island Rat.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003602

Confined to an Island, unlikely to happen to humans I would think.

It was probably disease + competition with the new rats though, not disease alone.

PermeateFree said:

Maybe via our higher hygiene standards and lack of interaction of new microbes, we reduce the beneficial ones and encourage the bad ones due to the lack of microbial competition. The reduction of other microbes from other sources, would also weaken the existing beneficial genetic diversity, again providing opportunities for the bad microbes, which being more common within the human population would be quick to take advantage.

From my impressions of reading the article, it was not inferring a catastrophic event, but the gradual decline of good microbial safeguards combined with a higher likelihood due to the weakened microbial state, thereby opening the possibility of a catastrophic event, or a gradual decline in the general health of human populations.

PermeateFree said:

Maybe via our higher hygiene standards and lack of interaction of new microbes, we reduce the beneficial ones and encourage the bad ones due to the lack of microbial competition. The reduction of other microbes from other sources, would also weaken the existing beneficial genetic diversity, again providing opportunities for the bad microbes, which being more common within the human population would be quick to take advantage.

For someone with AIDS, the more diverse the microbiome – the faster they die.

I am actually in a moral dilemma over human microbiome diversity. Think of yourself as a tree. A tree hosts many organisms, birds that break off twigs and eat seeds, insects that burrow into bark and eat leaves and seeds, fungi that eat into the heart of the the tree and also feed off its roots. And pathogenic bacteria. Biome diversity kills the tree. So think of yourself as a tree, how many years of your life would you be willing to lose in order to support a larger biome diversity on your body?

mollwollfumble said:

PermeateFree said:

Maybe via our higher hygiene standards and lack of interaction of new microbes, we reduce the beneficial ones and encourage the bad ones due to the lack of microbial competition. The reduction of other microbes from other sources, would also weaken the existing beneficial genetic diversity, again providing opportunities for the bad microbes, which being more common within the human population would be quick to take advantage.

For someone with AIDS, the more diverse the microbiome – the faster they die.

I am actually in a moral dilemma over human microbiome diversity. Think of yourself as a tree. A tree hosts many organisms, birds that break off twigs and eat seeds, insects that burrow into bark and eat leaves and seeds, fungi that eat into the heart of the the tree and also feed off its roots. And pathogenic bacteria. Biome diversity kills the tree. So think of yourself as a tree, how many years of your life would you be willing to lose in order to support a larger biome diversity on your body?

Yes some microbes are bad for you, but others are highly beneficial to health and if we did not have them, we would likely die.

some interesting background information

Human_microbiota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiota

Relative numbersAs of 2014, it was often reported in popular media and in the scientific literature that there are about 10 times as many microbial cells in the human body as there are human cells; this figure was based on estimates that the human microbiome includes around 100 trillion bacterial cells and that an adult human typically has around 10 trillion human cells. In 2014, the American Academy of Microbiology published a FAQ that emphasized that the number of microbial cells and the number of human cells are both estimates, and noted that recent research had arrived at a new estimate of the number of human cells – approximately 37.2 trillion, meaning that the ratio of microbial-to-human cells, if the original estimate of 100 trillion bacterial cells is correct, is closer to 3:1. In 2016, another group published a new estimate of the ratio being roughly 1:1 (1.3:1, with “an uncertainty of 25% and a variation of 53% over the population of standard 70-kg males”).

Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells

t’s often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one. That’s a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate.

and

Human Gut Loaded with More Bacteria Than Thought

The new study found that the bacteria community of the colon was even more diverse than ever imagined, turning up at least 5,600 separate species or strains. The work was funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.

> I am actually in a moral dilemma over human microbiome diversity. How many years of your life would you be willing to lose in order to support a larger biome diversity on your body?

I mean it. 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? 40 years?

mollwollfumble said:

> I am actually in a moral dilemma over human microbiome diversity. How many years of your life would you be willing to lose in order to support a larger biome diversity on your body?

I mean it. 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? 40 years?

According to the article the human microbiome is stagnating and in danger of being taken over by bad microbes.