Microbiome and the New Scurvy

In several moments of medicine, the cure was discovered before the cause of the disease was known. Hippocrates treated the anemia of women and children by giving them blackened water from a vase where he left a sword immersed for a few days: iron oxide and ferrous sulfate, the same active principles of medicines that we still use today to treat sideropenia.

In 1747, through the first clinical trial in history, James Lind discovered that citrus fruits and spruce beer cured scurvy, a terrible disease that killed thousands of English sailors, two centuries before the discovery of vitamin C, whose history is a special chapter in medicine. There are many other examples.

In the last half-century, many new epidemic and endemic diseases of insidious behavior have increased and continue to grow in the world, especially in the most civilized regions of the planet; and the sum of evidence points to the depletion and breakdown of the symbiosis with the microbiome as the main factor associated with these many conditions.

The fact is, as we barely understand how it operates or how we actually interact with the microbiota of the planet; and its composition is so vast, and the interactions so complex that we cannot yet speak of causalities, but only of associations. And there are so many associations, and the spectrum of clinical conditions is so varied, that there is no way to escape the recognition that the breakdown of what I have called the greater symbiosis is indeed the cause of this variety of ills, which are even intertwined.

For example, through the extensive research described in Pandemics Entangled?, I have disclosed that the fundamental etiogenic factor in the ME/CFS/Fibromyalgia complex is the distancing or destruction that civilization imposes on the planet's microbiome around and inside us, and the consequences of this go further.

Thus, science associates the altered microbiome with conditions such as allergies, sensitivity to multiple substances, ulcerative colitis, necrotizing enteritis of newborns, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases, diabetes, atopy and asthma, cardiometabolic diseases, and cancer. Plus those strange conditions that I didn't see in medical school, but are now part of my daily life: epidemic gastroesophageal reflux disease, pandemic h. pylori and gastric disease, non-celiac gluten intolerance, endemic obesity, panic disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression suicide complex. The list is much longer, and growing.

If we consider the history of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome/fibromyalgia) we find that those are conditions of people and human groups that, in different ways and always for reasons related to civilization, have distanced themselves from nature, from the symbiosis with the microcosm. And this led to some very strange things, like the Gulf War Syndrome – in which ailments in veterans caused by factors directly related to the war entangle with (a disease identical to) ME/CFS that afflicted them, but also the non-military personnel who were in the war, such as administrative staff and members of the press. And more strangely, many of their family members – people who have never been to the Middle East.

Going back to the first paragraph, the fundamental etiogenic factor for scurvy in sailors was the prolonged time at sea, more specifically the prolonged distance from land, where there was a vital principle that did not exist in the sea: vitamin C.

Seen from this perspective, civilized humans are now experiencing A NEW SCURVY, a set of diseases with a common etiogenic factor: the distancing of the natural microbiome; and this time not from land, but from Earth.

Again, the letter C represents a huge contingent of the affected, because according to the CDC it is in the class C of the United States that ME/CFS expands most in the country. It is in microbiome environments similar to that in which the North American class C lives that the disease expands in the world. The environment with sanitation, hygiene, and sterile food that only people from classes A-B reach in emerging countries. The same environment veterans were in during the Gulf War – and outside of it, their families.

In the environment of the 2001 Gulf War, military vehicles represented the British ships of the 17th and 18th centuries. Nowadays, the fear of water-cycle diseases has given rise to a portentous capacity to produce sterile military rations and drinking water, totally deprived of the microbiome; and which represents the new scurvy, the diet of those English soldiers in their old ships, deprived of a vital principle from which they should never split.

In the recent past, when a few hundred proteins and antibodies made it difficult to understand the HLA System, it took the intervention of a mathematician to unravel the complexity of that system, which today involves thousands of proteins.

However, our relationship with the microbiome is infinitely more complex. And although it has been easy to understand how a single kind of microorganism causes a disease (such as trypanosomiasis), or how two types of pathogens cause a disease (Paul-Vincent's angina, and long-term salmonellosis); or how a single type of microorganism causes more than one disease (such as VZV causing chickenpox and herpes zoster, or EBV that determines mononucleosis and Burkitt's lymphoma), understanding our interactions with millions of microorganisms that interact with each other and participate in the integrity and function of all living forms will indeed be an almost impossible, spectacular feat.

However, everything leads us to believe that meta-analyses evaluated by artificial intelligence under quantum computing, will soon be the power capable of showing the homo sapiens the fascinating dance of the micro-world with all living things is really like.

Those who live will see.

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