The Parasite Underground

Trichuris eggs. Nikon MicroscopyU

A really interesting story appears in today’s New York Times, written by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, who is the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies  and Autoimmune Diseases.” The article tells the story of a man called Vik who suffered so terribly from  gastroenteritis that doctors warned him he might have to undergo surgery to remove large sections of his bowel – leaving him with a colostomy bag for life. Instead, and in desperation, he self-treated himself by deliberately infecting himself with the eggs of Trichuris trichiura (the human whipworm) – a helminth species parasitic in the gut – which he collected from the stools of an 11 year-old girl in Thailand. This story is also referred to in “Body by Darwin” although at that time I was not able to reveal anything about the man’s identity.

Individuals taking medicine into their own hands like this are either foolishly dicing with danger or heroic medical frontiersmen – depending on your point of view – and initiatives like this are, ultimately, no substitute for proper evidential medicine that has resulted from research and medical trial. But medicine is often slow to react to change and novelty. A new area of research, like the thesis that much of our current pandemics of autoimmune and allergic disease stems from the absence of the parasitic worms and “friendly” bacteria once so common in our guts, often throws up self-experimenting pioneers. For instance, to prove that  Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers, the Australian internist Barry Marshall swallowed the bacteria and gave himself an ulcer; he shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for this work. What is interesting, and reassuring, about today’s story is that “Vik” took his inspiration from good microbiome/disease research conducted by Joel Weinstock, and his colleagues, then at the University of Iowa. He subsequently joined a research program in New York, run by Prof. P’ng Loke, which is investigating the links between inflammatory gut disorders and gut parasites. Oh! And, “yes”, in this case, the treatment worked! https://www.mabvi.org/wp-content/languages/new/isofair.html
https://www.mabvi.org/wp-content/languages/new/lamisil.html
https://www.mabvi.org/wp-content/languages/new/lariam.html