"Germs are everywhere: in air, soil, rocks, and water; in plants and animals; and, of course, in our own bodies. Some thrive in intense heat, while others require extreme subzero temperatures. Many have a remarkable ability to replicate themselves rapidly, reproducing every few hours in some cases - an evolutionary trick that makes them highly adaptable to changing environments and to the medicines we use to fight them." - Chapter 1: The Immune System's Role in Protection - the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)
Some bacteria is good for us (commensal) and some of it isn't. Some bacteria live in our stomachs and help to digest the food there. But some bacteria can also make us very sick. About one in eight bacteria are not good for you. Some bacteria arrives in the food you eat and it is poison. Food poisoning is not good. Neither is bacterial contamination. Antrax is a bacteria that kills. So will Lyme disease which is transmitted by _infected_ ticks. And parasites come in all sizes and shapes. They'll invade your body and they will eat you alive.
We are at war. As quickly as we develop new methods of defense, ways to destroy bad bacteria, protozoa and other parasites get into us as unwelcome guests and they do their dirty deed and leave us debilitated and near death or dead.
There are snake-like roundworms (Ascaris lumbriocoides) in the intestines of about 1.5 billion humans. And in 1.3 billion humans there are blood-sucking Hookworms. One billion have whipworms." (ibid)
How many of you know you have been infected by parasites? How many have had intestinal parasites? I did once when I went on a gambling junket to Haiti and I made the mistake of drinking the water. It kept me sick for months during which time I lost 30 pounds. I thought the medication would kill me and it almost did, but it killed the parasites before it could kill me. It was a mean parasite and I never got a name for it (or if I did, I don't remember it).
Parasites comprise single-celled protozoa but also multicellular animals, such as nematodes and helminths - which are worms. They need a moist environment and they very often cause disease in humans. You can get infected by drinking contaminated water, as I did in Haiti. (Actually, it was the ice.) You can become infected by eating infected food or not washing your hands. One of the most common infections which everyone has heard about is malaria. My wife's father was in the Pacific in WWII and he came home with it. It causes recurring fever and chills. Malaria kills.
You might be infected by single-celled trypanosomes if while bitten by a tsetse fly and it drinks your blood these little creatures enter that anesthesized wound and then sets about stealing your oxygen and glucose and slips into your brain and you have contracted "sleeping sickness." The cure may kill you. The poison to rid a person of trypanosomes is so potent, that 20% of it is arsenic and it will melt ordinary plastic IV tubes. When it gets on your skin it will burn and cause a painful mass of melted swollen flesh.
The Onchocerca volvulus, which enters the body from the bite of the black fly looks liked coiled long snakes thin as threads and travels through your skin where it often triggers a violent immune response and causes leopard spot-like rashes on your skin. It is so itchy you may scratch yourself to death. It causes a disease which is called river blindness. In some places in Africa every person over forty is blind from this unfriendly parasite.
The Guinea worms are two-foot long creatures which causes blisters on your legs. The parasite crawls out of the blisters in a few days.
There are filarial which which cause a disease you may have heard on a TV show, called "Doctor House", which is my favorate medical show. It is elephantiasis and your scrotum can swell up so large it can fit in a wheelbarrow. And then there are the eyeless, mouth-less tapeworms, which live in our guts and can grow as long as 60 feet.
It should not be a surprise to anyone that so many people are sick so much of the time. Bacteria, parasites, viruses are everywhere and they are in us causing disease, discomfort, and sometimes death. What keeps us well enough to meet our evolutionary goal of surviving for a relative short period of biological time and reproducing our DNA in our progeny, which is what we are programmed to do AND because of the success of an immune system which mounts a courageous defense against this constant assault; An assault by an army of self reproducing protozoa and bacteria and the viruses which use us to reproduce - which is what viruses and parasites and bacteria do.
We don't win the war although we win some skirmishes. It is this constant state of war which makes us go though periods of feeling bad. What is predictable is: feeling good is not going to last. When we're feeling bad we are in the middle of a battle against these aliens and yet, these invaders, which like us, have genetic details in their DNA and these parasites and the bacterium are also our distant relatives and the viruses may also be pieces of `our' genetic code which has been sliced out by enzymes and inserted elsewhere in our DNA causing disease and even death.
Not feeling good is our destiny just as it was for Neanderthals, robust cousins of ours which went extinct about tens of thousands of years ago for reasons we don't yet know though we have evidence that they suffered too as also did the dinosaurs - from arthritis and from traumatic injuries. We know this from the scientific research. We're learning more about ourselves from paleopathologists and other scientists - by studying our ancestors and their offspring and other hominids which are now gone and we will perhaps follow their example for much of the same reasons. Could it have been invasive parasites or bacteria which did them in? We don't know YET.
Most parasites and most bacteria don't want to kill us. They want to live in us so if they killed us they would be homeless. It is to their advantage to keep us alive - or, at least not to do so much damage that it will cause us to die.
About 10,000 years ago agricultural settlements were established and a pandemic of anemia spread through them as evidenced by porotic hyperostosis, where the bone marrow tissues increases in volume to compensate for loss of red blood cells. Some say it was because of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum which causes malaria and some believe it may have been hookworm infection which caused this abnormality. In either case, clearing land for agriculture provided the right conditions for mosquitoes to breed and transfer parasites to humans. (This is similar to the conditions caused in the modern world from building dams and clearing rain-forests leading to more mosquito's) Some scientists think that more agriculture was a consequence of less available prey and anemia was more likely a result of malnutrition. We will perhaps never know for sure. But we do know that parasitic infestation became rampant with the advent of the Agricultural Revolution.
The most common and prevalent parasite in the U.S. is the pinworm, Enterobius vermicularis a/k/a seatworm and threadworm. About 50,000,000 Americans are infected with pinworms. Hundreds of millions are infected worldwide. Pinworms live in your intestines and they survive by eating some of the nutrients in your food. Not all of your nutrients because that would not be wise. If you died so would the pinworms or they would have to find another host so they take what they need but not so much that it would kill you. The most common symptom of pinworms is an itchy rectum or vagina. The symptoms are worse at night when the worms are most active and crawl out of the anus to deposit their eggs. Although pinworm infections can be very annoying, they are usually not dangerous. These are small white worms, about a half inch long and females pinworms lay about 15,000 eggs per day. The pinworm scotch tape method of diagnosis is recommended. Before a bowel movement you would attach tape to the area where irritation occurs and it would then be removed and looked at under a microscope. It is not recommended that you do this on your own and I suggest you do not scratch your ass. When Europeans first came to America the only parasite found from the study of fossilized feces were pinworms. Other diseases arrived with the Europeans.
Tim Batchelder in "The paleoecology of pinworms" (Medical Anthropology) from the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients - 5/1/2005 wrote:
"I remember my first exposure to pinworms. I was participating in a field school practicing anthropological observation skills in a remote area of British Columbia. We had been sleeping outside for months, on the ground, and I discovered that a friend of mine had contracted a nasty case of the worms. She was forced to shine a flashlight on her anus in the middle of the night in order to confirm that she did indeed have pinworms. The worms would come to the surface to lay eggs at night and one could observe them crawling around. Another time I too observed the worms in my own feces after an extended period of purification and treatment with bitter herbs. They wriggled alive and were about the size of a paper clip as I looked on in disgust." (ibid)
"According to the CDC fact sheet, pinworm is the most common worm infection in the United States. Pinworm infection is caused by a small, white intestinal worm called Enterobius vermicularis about the length of a staple, that live in the rectum of humans. While an infected person sleeps, female pinworms leave the intestines through the anus and deposit eggs on the surrounding skin which causes itching. It was at this time that my mind turned to the anthropology of pinworms. How is it that humans have suffered from these parasites for so long and when did pinworms indeed first become a human health problem?" (ibid)
Pinworms and other worm infestations were less a problem for hunter-gatherers than the era which began with the agricultural period. The greater population density of of population pressure in agricultural settlements and living in farming villages - the physiological aberrations of civilized living - exacerbated parasitic infestations, including pinworms, tapeworms, thorny-headed worms and other diseases. There really is something to be said for healthier, living in those early hunter-gatherer societies - besides all the exercise our cave relatives must have gotten chasing down their prey and outsmarting predators with their enlarged neo-cortex, which perhaps evolved for exactly that reason.
The arthropod parasite is a mite, Sarcoptes scabei, causes scabies. It causes vaginitis in females and urethral disease in males.
A parasite which you probably have heard the name mentioned is Toxoplasma gondii. The Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite that often causes blindness. It will cause severe neurological disease in newborns. New forms of Toxoplasma bacteria are unaffected by penicillin. Many can actually absorb antibiotics and seem to thrive on them and hospitals are breeding grounds for these insidious little creatures. T. gondii may infect up to 30 percent of the population of the U.S. and they become very lethal when a patient is given steroids or any immunosupressive drugs for cancer or to those receiving organ transplants. Immunologically compromised patients are particularly at risk when they are infected with Toxoplasma gondii.
Giardiasis, Giardia lamblia, causes diarrhea and comes from eating raw or undercooked food. The diagnosis would be by examining stool samples (in the lab - not in the home). Coccidia (Cryptosporidium) is a single celled parasite which also causes diarrhea mostly in your pets but there are a few species which also affect humans. It does not affect humans. If your animal is losing weight and has persistent diarrhea, have it checked for parasites (all of them). If you are losing weight you may want to bottle the worms and sell them to other obese people. This infection is also accompanied by fever, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting.
Hookworm, Necator americanus, is an intestinal parasite which is found extensively in the tropics and sub-tropical regions. About a billion people are infected with hookworms.
Amebiasis is a disease caused by the parasite entamoeba, Entamoeba histolytica. This one too is very common in the U.S. by those who were recently traveled to developing countries where they consumed contaminated food or water. Most of the people who are contaminated exhibit mild symptoms of loose stools and stomach pain 1 to 4 weeks after the infection. Entamoeba dispar is similar but a different species.
"Microbes are among the oldest living things on Earth, having existed long before humans. Geologists have found fossil records of bacteria dating back 3.5 billion years. What we now know as polio was depicted in Egyptian stone engravings from 1300 B.C.; the Greek physician Hippocrates described malaria in the fourth century B.C. The famous Ice Man, the remarkably well-preserved Ice Age human discovered in northern Italy in 1991, was found to have the eggs of a type of parasitic roundworm in his intestines." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System A Defense against Hostile Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)
Roundworms, Ascaris sp., are among the most common parasitic infection in the world, and is primarily it will be found in the tropical and subtropical regions. But they are rare rare in the US. Most of the infected do not show any symptoms. Those with symptoms will have some abdominal pain and weight gain. Occasionally there will be constipation.
Tapeworms, Dipylidium caninum, are the most common parasite in dogs and cats, who if by swallowing fleas may become infected with tapeworm larvae. The risk of a tapeworm infection for humans is comparatively low, unless you too, swallow an infected flea. Hey, I once swallowed a spider.
Toxocariasis, Toxocara canis and Toxocara cati, is a zoonotic (you get it from animals) disease caused by parasitic worms found in the intestines of dogs, Toxocara canis; and cats, Toxocara cati. Humans contract the disease by accidentally ingesting Toxocara eggs, which are expelled with the animal's stool. That is a revolting thought. BUT, Toxocariasis may affect the eye when the worm enters the eye and would result in visual impairment. And it can also result in swelling of organs accompanied by symptoms which include coughing and a fever.
Trichinosis, Trichinella spiralis, an infection by a roundworm, by ingestion of raw or undercooked meat and predominantly pork. The symptoms may include abdominal pain and aching muscles and joints.
Whipworms, Trichuris trichiura and Trichuris vulpis, are long and whip-like with over sixty species of whipworms existing. There is a canine whipworm but also a human whipworm (Trichuris trichiura). Symptoms of whipworm include abdominal pain, diarrhea and bloody stools (female whipworms can lay as many as 10,000 eggs a day).
Strongyloidosis, Strongyloides stercoralis, are similar to hookworms. These worms are also able to survive and reproduce in the soil without a host. People become infected through direct contact with infected soil containing larvae. The larvae penetrates through the skin, making its way into the intestine. Most people with strongyloidosis don't know they have it, though there may be intermittent periods of moderate to severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation. Examination of stool samples and blood tests are required for a diagnosis. If you suspect any parasitic infection you need to advise your doctor when you traveled and your suspicions. These are easy to miss and if you do they can stay with you for years, if not your entire life. It is no accident (because of either no symptoms or slight symptoms) that practically EVERYONE has some parasites and they don't know it.
If viruses don't get you, bacteria will. Bacteria are evolving and becoming even more lethal and antibiotic resistant. We are ill prepared for the coming plagues - and they're coming. I'm not crying wolf. There is reason to be concerned not just about global warming, but about the affects these chemicals are having on the ecosystem and our ability to withstand the all out assault on your health from pollution which Republicans and Democrats have made worse chasing profits - and it is too late to say we didn't see it coming.
This _thing_ we call progress is actually leading us to extinction. Dams can bring disease. If you live near a dam or lake when a lake is filled in and it once held crops there is the potential for schistosomiasis and malaria. Who gets to weigh these advantages against the risks that are caused by damming up a former village for cheap hydroelectric power? Who really benefits? Those who live in the city benefit but those who live in the shadow of those dams live with increased risk of disease.
Chopping down trees in a rain forest - something as simple as exposing ground water to sunlight become ideal breeding habitats for Mosquito's, Anopheles gumbiae - and there has been a resurgence of drug resistant parasites which transmit malaria. When you replace a water buffalo with a tractor the ideal host for those parasites changes and becomes a human - which taste a whole lot better than diesel fuel - as is happening in Thailand with Japanese encephalitis - a virus transmitted by the mosquito, Culex tritaemorphynchus - and rice paddies, the breeding grounds. While this encephalitis also likes hogs, water buffalo was used to plow the rice paddies while pigs were kept for food and market. The buffalo limited viral transmission to hogs. It was what they called a "blotter" because the parasite, C. tritaeniorhynchus preferred buffalo to pork. Replacing the water buffalo with tractors is progress which caused the mosquito's which carried the parasites to change their target host to hogs and to humans. Pigs became infected; more mosquito's become carriers and more humans became infected. So much for progress.
The bird flu - a/k/a avian influenza is a pandemic waiting to happen. These are viruses which infect birds, primarily poultry - but human cases have turned up mostly in Asia but the virus is mutating FAST and changing rapidly enough for a new strain to become emergent which will be able to jump from human to human with the potential to kill millions of humans.
A lot of these deaths could have been prevented. It is like climate change. We have the warning. We can do something about it. We choose not to. What do you expect will happen? We humans are not only tragic, we're stupid.
Some of them cause a disease called malaria. Some of them will give you a fever. Some will cause bloody urine. And some of them are quivering strings of flesh looking worms which spool out of your skin and some put you to sleep -- (for good).
There are leaf-shaped parasitic flukes that live in a person's liver and blood. If infected, you can accumulate so many you will glitter and your skin will appear transparent.
Life is simple in its complexity. We talk about being in charge of our destiny but some things are just determined not by supernatural forces but by the natural consequences of biological selection for survival and reproduction. Charles Darwin put it in terms of "modification by descent", evolving by natural selection of mutations which provide the best fitness. It seems mindless and in a whole lot of ways it is. It does not take conscious determination but it does take alteration and mutations which offer the best chances for adapting to an organism's environment are the changes which survive - and we don't even have to think about it because we don't have a conscience choice - anymore than the Dicrocelium dendriticum in Dennett's Breaking the Spell. That is destiny.
Daniel Dennett describes an ant whose brain is "commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke" which is programmed by thousands of years of evolution to get inside another host in order to reproduce and uses the ant to do it. The ant, like Sisyphus, keeps climbing to the top of the grass so it can be eaten by a cow or a sheep. Obviously there is no benefit to the ant's reproductive success to die by being consumed by cows or sheep, but it has been driven to do it by the parasite which has commandeered its brain. And this happens throughout the animal kingdom with fish, with mice, with other hosts driven to their death by the parasitic organism which now inhabits its body. It even happens to us. And as Dennett points out it happens to Homo sapiens who are consumed by their belief in religions, the memes which they are so convinced of, they are willing to die for and believe they're going to heaven if they do. Or will have their way with 72 virgins. Islam means "submission" and indeed that is what it is.
There is another world and it lives in us. That world has caused more death and devastation than all the wars ever fought and will bring down on us the next plague. It is the world of viruses, bacteria, protozoa and lancet flukes.
Bacteria of composed of loose DNA and loosely assembled proteins, whereas protozoa are multicellular and more like us with their DNA intact. They are living organisms. Viruses are not living organisms; they are chunks of genes which use our DNA to replicate. And microbial infectious parasites are everywhere.
"Modern medical science has increasingly implicated microbes in coronary artery disease, diabetes, autism, multiple sclerosis, chronic lung disease, and certain types of cancer. In fact, microbial infections account for more deaths worldwide than any other single cause, and the cost to treat them exceeds $120 billion a year in the United States alone." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System - A Defense against Hostile Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)
Ticks are insects commonly found in wooded areas. Some species carry the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease. Like mosquitoes, they feed on the blood of other animals, but unlike mosquitoes, they hook into the animal's skin for extended periods of time. (CDC)
Plasmodium, the parasite which causes malaria is a protozoan and there are multiple species which get into humans when mosquito's (Spanish for "little flies") vampire-like suck human blood. Tsetse flies dose their human victims with the sleeping sickness. In Europe and the Americas bacteria and viruses have caused tuberculosis and polio. Protozoa hang out mostly in the tropics and poor people suffer the most from parasites. During the period of colonization a whole new field of medicine sprang up to study these diseases, which was called tropical medicine.
According to Laurie Garrett in The Coming Plague (1994), in the second year of WWII, penicillin was dispersed to Army doctors to use for malaria and even in the small dose which was used then it was highly successful. Army doctors, she says, were so impressed with it that they "collected the urine of patients who were on the drug and crystallized excreted penicillin for reuse on other GIs." That small dose in 1993 would have been in inadequate and today the plasmodium parasite has evolved a resistance to penicillin.
Carl Zimmer writes in Parasite, Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures (2001): "Europeans came to look upon parasites as robbing them of native labor, of slowing down the building of their canals and dams, of preventing the white race from living happily at the Equator. When Napoleon took his army to Egypt, the soldiers began to complain that they were menstruating like women. Actually they had been infected with flukes..."
These flukes lived in snails and attracted to humans they would infect their victims by attaching themselves to their legs and feet in the lakes and ocean and enter their veins and stomachs, finding their way to the bladder where they lay their eggs. Those infected would urinate blood.
"Blood flukes attacked people from the western shores of Africa to the rivers of Japan; the slave trade even brought them to the New World, where they thrived in Brazil and the Caribbean. The disease they caused, known as bilharzia or schistosomiasis (mentioned a few times on Dr. House), drained the energy of hundreds of millions of people who were supposed to build European empires." (Zimmer)
Vaccines were not successful and other meds did little good. The better method to control them was not to encourage their habitation at all, to kill the cause rather than treat the symptoms.
Burma has been in the news lately for its political unrest, tsunamis and typhons, but not so much is reported about the debilitating parasite causing diseases and death where 75% of those seeking medical health care each year in that country alone was because of malaria and other parasites - where the mosquito became resistant to DDT and other insecticides. And other high death and disease causing parasitic diseases break out, such as the filariasis, cholera and dengue hemorrhagic fever, killing thousands throughout the region.
And these parasitic disease are not all class based infections. Many of them attack everyone. As pointed out by Robert Desowitz in New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers, Toxoplasma gondii (a protozoan parasite that can cause blindness and severe neurological disease in the newborn) infect citizens without regard to race, creed or economic class."
Parasites are becoming increasingly prevalent and problematic because they are the result of human exploitation of resources and land, building dams, destruction of rain forests, and what feels like progress, but turns out to be very harmful in the long run. Life can't be happier if you are dead.
We are in a _middle_ world and we are just discovering there is another world out here; a very small world. The big world is also mysterious to us; it is the world of the universe which is so huge we have difficulty wrapping our minds around concepts like dark matter and dark energy - and we really don't know what it is and it may have its own natural laws.
And in the middle and small worlds anything which contains DNA has the tools therein to replicate itself using a blueprint of some of genetic code and some of it is essentially the same for every living thing on the planet - or else it did not originate here on the planet - and the earliest life did not in fact originate on this planet. The first life, our ancestors, arrived here from somewhere out there in the universe, in the bigger world.
But much closer to us in genetic similarity are not the single celled molecular extremeophiles which started it all; they are the creatures which evolved to live in us and every species on the planet. They outnumber other species about four to one and some parasites even have their own parasites. They are the majority of the species on this planet.
They live in other animals and in us with ease. Many of them change our personalities, manage our immune systems, reproduce inside of us, and sometimes they kill us, and coexist with us. Some of them castrate us and some take over our minds.
Everything living has some parasites living inside of them. That is a world you may be barely aware of but it is there and it may be killing us. As you get older chances are you will acquire more and more of these creatures which are often there for more than just the ride.
They areAs we learn more about parasites we're finding out they may be the dominant force in evolution. We evolve defenses against them, but they seem to be winning.
Those who caution against dire predictions of doom and gloom ignore the reality which does demand not only our awareness, but action to prevent it. Climate change is a procursor to more disease and so is the evolving resistance of microbial infectious agents to antibiotics. So is the evolution of new infections, new parasites in this battle for life on the planet - which they are winning. There has already been five major extinctions and there are scientists who tell us we're in the sixth extinction level now. Sure, some will say the planet can survive this, but what about humanity? It is with high probability that we will not survive the onslaught and will lose this war to emerging diseases.
If you have pain and you don't feel so good, at least you can take that as a sign you are still alive. When I had my tic douloureux pain, which is considered by many neurologists to be the "worst pain known to man" after I would have an attack, usually lasting several minutes (but rarely longer than that), the pain would be so bad that I almost welcomed it because it felt SOOO good when it was gone. In my support groups others have said the same thing. It would never leave abruptly. It (the pain) would tend to fade away. And while I could have very well done without it, it was a reminder that I was alive.
Our immune systems are as incredible as they are complex with their multiple cells, each of them doing something else - and the billions of memories they would have for the antigens they would have to attach to. The immune system is a huge database of information and warrior cells. The warriors regularly travel our blood stream attacking and winning battles against disease and germs. We don't always feel so good sometimes when they are working overtime to kill off these alien invaders, but they're doing their job and we have to be glad they are.
When we feel like crap we know we're alive and our warrior cells are working to keep us that way. The pain and that feeling like crap just goes with the territory.
Sweating is another sign that we are alive. We humans sweat to keep our body temperature controlled. Dogs sweat through their paws. We sweat through our skin. It is an evolutionary anatomical physicological adaption to the stress we feel when we work or exercise hard. The skin is our radiator for those small veins and arteries within which blood flows and the heat is radiant energy. Evaporation of salty water manufactured in our sweat glands over our entire thermo-regulatory body surface keeps our temperature where it needs to be for the rest of our biology to work right.
Sweat is secreted through the skin. Hair follicles are present in the skin of all of us mammals and there are apocrine glands which secrete a fluid which appears as lather on horses but also exude an order on us humans, especially on our armpits, and around our nipples, our belly button and our genitalia. Those apocrine glands are not about controlling body temperature but rather the heat of emotion. The true sweat glands are eccrine glands which are widely distributed over our entire body. Incidentally, being able to sweat over our entire body helped our ancestors to be able to hunt in the middle (during the hottest) part of the day. The downside meant we were also bound to water and had to be near water sources most of the time so we could replenish what we sweat and peed. We can't just hold it almost forever, like a camel.
And, our enlarged brain enables us to figure out how to out-smart predators and opposable thumbs facilitate holding a gun or swinging an axe or pulling the bow string back on a bow.
The assault on our biology by various attackers is fought off by hand to hand combat by phagocite components of our white blood cells; macrophages, dendritic cells, granulocytes, complement cells, lymphocite T and B cells and TK cells, and chemical cytokines, etc.
There is also our symbiotic relationship with parasitic bacteria and protozoa. It is a fragility which can have lethal consequences at times. All of life is a story of death, pain and feeling like crap. They are all very closely related.
Every species has gone through a transition with variations which through natural selection enabled it to survive for a time and every species has changed or died. We are not our ancestors but we owe them our existence. All of us are made up of variants, of life forms, some which have done better than others - and for the most part they want to keep us alive if we are their natural host so they may continue to live but they won't live peacefully. There is no peace on the planet. There is only constant battle and an unending arms race for survival.
"Your body's first line of defense against any hostile invader is something you probably take for granted: your skin, the body's largest organ. Among other health-related duties, the skin protects against biological predators in several ways. Skin has three layers, providing a formidable physical barrier to bugs. Sweat, oils, and other skin secretions help neutralize and wash away invaders. And our skin is populated by harmless bacteria that consume nutrients that would otherwise feed enemy invaders." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System - A Defense against Hostile Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)
"But the barrier that skin provides isn't foolproof: the eyes, nose, and mouth all provide openings where invaders can sneak in. For this reason, your body has a second set of biological barriers, located in the mucous membranes that line these openings. Every time you blink your eyes, for example, your eyelids wash away microbes much the way windshield wipers sweep away debris. Inhale something that your body knows doesn't belong, like pollen, and you'll sneeze the invader out. Saliva and tears both contain the enzyme lysozyme, which destroys bacteria. Any harmful bacteria that somehow manage to sneak down your throat plunge into a deadly acid bath in your stomach." (ibid)
"Unfortunately, wily bugs are sometimes able to breach these multiple barriers......." (ibid)
Hank RothThey really are smart (smart at what they do, for what they are) and they also inhabit OUR world. It makes you wonder: do we inhabit another living world ALSO? What if the universe is really ONE BIG LIVING ORGANISM and we're just like those parasites -- ALL OF US eating at the same table?
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