Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

by Martin J. Blaser

Humanity is just a speck in the massively bacterial world. We need to get used to that idea.

Genes that code for a crucial enzyme, DNA polymerase, needed for making new strands, have been identified. Humans have several varieties of this gene, whereas your resident microbes may have thousands, each one slightly different, depending on which bacterium it comes from.

David Quammen, in his book Spillover, about emerging infectious diseases, notes that we think of predators as big beasts that eat their prey from the outside, whereas pathogens are small beasts that eat their prey from within. It’s an apt description.

All strains of penicillin today are descendants from that 1943 mold.

We found that H. pylori–positive subjects were, on average, twenty-one years old when their asthma started. For those without H. pylori, the average age of onset was eleven.