Linda and Viv Hailwood
on a beautiful hike, in the Yorkshire Dales
This has
little to do with ovarian cancer, but it reports a potentially important
advance in medical knowledge, so I thought I would share it.
You probably
are aware that the human body is host to literally trillions of little critters
– microbes, often bacteria – that together play an important role in how we
function. I have written about such
stuff several times, beginning five years ago with this masterful essay:
Since that
time there has been considerable interest in our microbiome; in fact, NIH has
given it its own Human Microbiome
Project, some results of which Dr. Collins, NIH Director, writes about in
the link given below.
Dr. Collins
article concerns Parkinson’s disease.
Apparently there is no cure (as yet) for Parkinson’s, but a drug called
L-dopa can relieve its symptoms.
However, L-dopa doesn’t work well for everyone. It turns out that some people have a gut
bacterium, with the pleasing name Enterococcus
faecalis, which consumes L-dopa. For
such folks the standard treatment for Parkinson’s doesn’t work. Naturally, the diligent folks at NIH are
working on a way to frustrate E.
faecalis. Bless their efforts
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