I love seeing this kind of thing posted but it’s not surprising in the slightest. We’re forever discovering brew bacteria in our guts that are apparently unique. When I had my gut bacteria tested a full 20% of what I had hadn’t been named yet, and some possibly hadn’t been seen before.
It is not just the human body. Mysterious bacteria that people don't know how to cultivate in isolation are everywhere. Part of the story is that many bacteria don't really live alone but they depend on a plant or an animal or even other bacteria such as one species of large rod bacteria that has a different species of little rod bacteria that live on it, biofilms, etc.
I had an interesting experience recently where I was sick with a virus for an entire month, ending up in multiple urgent cares followed by the ER for 24 hours.
They took blood from me seemingly every 10 minutes and ran every test they could and in the end couldn't figure out what it was. The doctors (in a very major hospital in a very major city) didn't even seem surprised, they just shrugged and said I had some unknown virus that they didn't have a test for. The way they acted it seemed like a regular occurrence. Just some mystery virus.
It was just so shocking for me that there could be some virus out there that had me horribly sick for an entire month, much sicker than covid or the flu ever made me, and there's not even a test for it, it's just spreading out there doing its thing. Makes me wonder how little we really know.
I’m not surprised you got sick from something that wasn’t identified before you got better. These things happen all the time.
I would imagine it was a known (or new) virus that would be identified if we had the time and resources. With so much money in pharmaceutical applications I am surprised there is still unsequenced DNA.
One disturbing recent discovery is that a strain of E. coli produces a genotoxin, colibactin, that could be the cause of the doubling in colon cancer among those under age 55 in the last 20 years.
Doctors don't ask about this. People still take Prilosec, and it's acknowledged that it causes cancer. You get what you give: confirmation bias.
Edit: The essential problem is that ranitidine isn't shelf-stable. This could explain some problems with other theraputics which we won't name to avoid downvoting / politics.
It is acknowledged that nitrosamines cause cancer. It is acknowledged that ranitidine breaks down on the shelf to nitrosamines: this wasn't discovered by the FDA or another government agency, it was discovered by a mail-order, compounding pharmacy which also tests ingredients. Their discovery led to ranitidine being recalled.
As for prilosec: the cancer risk is acknowledged in the packaging.
Hey. I brought up ranitidine because it is specifically associated with nitrosamines, and nitrosamines cause colon cancer. No redirect: colon cancer. You take issue with prilosec being admitted to this debate, then that would be because ion pump moderators cause stomach cancer. My bad: stomach cancer irrelevant to you.
You can't see ranitidine when it farts in your face: nitrosamines cause colon cancer. Why is that not relevant? Why is that not potentially more relevant than foo foo microbes? (By the way, I eat sour cream or yogurt when I eat meat or take e.g. glucosamine. YMMV.)
Why do you find it shocking and disturbing? If you go to the doctor, the average process of diagnosis and treatment is much like printf debugging - just sprinkle some based on instinct and run it again. We're surrounded by technological advancement that is making us feel like we're far in the future, but there's still so much we don't know.
How many of those centuries would they have been able to inspect, catalog, and widely distribute their findings about stuff as small as bacteria? The tools we have now are quite new, and still insufficient even now. Maybe in another 100 years we’ll have it all mapped out.
> The discovery of Methanobrevibacter intestini and GRAZ-2 opens up a new chapter in archaea research as well as new perspectives for personalized microbiome medicine in the future.
It advances research, but personalized microbiome research seems a stretch goal. At least, it doesn't sound like it's likely to happen soon.
This is perhaps what amazes me the most. We're each a Borg, we are a collective that has adapted the biological distinctiveness of bacteria that we've assimilated into a collective that "thinks." Pretty wild. That we gather in groups and act collectively just adds another layer of recursion to life.
It does make one reconsider the brain as the center of consciousness. Can we really upload our mind if the mind is actually the entirety of our collective being.
