From "His sudden seizures were a mystery. Then doctors saw a tapeworm in his brain from 20 years ago" (WaPo).
I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years. But then I start thinking about this: "Did you know that only one in ten of the cells in your body is actually human? That's right. A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature" (Huffpo).
Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?!
ADDED: I say "I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years," but why would I have thought that? Because the caption under the photograph at the top of the page says, "Doctors found that a tapeworm had been living in a 38-year-old man's brain for 20 years"!
पोस्ट्स
४३ टिप्पण्या:
'Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?!'
Ship of Theseus...
Pretty sure this was the first Dr. House episode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_(House)
What is you and what is not is something of a philosophical question. Your gut bacteria can have all sorts of effects on your health, your mood, even your thinking. The mitochondria in your cells is probably a different creature that was engulfed by and absorbed into your cells but, instead of being digested, it made itself useful and lives quite well in there acting as a power source for rest of the cell.
If you own a car for many years and, bit by bit, replace every part of it to keep it running, at what point does it stop being the car you originally bought? There is something similar going on with "your" body.
You know the saying “I won’t think less of you, if you say no”… little do they know how little there is of me and everybody else to begin with.
In the end it all piles up so tall
To one big Nothing
One Big Nothing At All
-Seek Up, Dave Matthews Band
"ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.
The Old Ones inhabit the land of madness.
Unmentionable, indescribable horrors are found in the gibbering of H.P. Lovecraft and parasitology journals.
That is mostly misleading and rather inaccurate. Nature magazine debunked it saying the ratio is more like one to one. But it is also very misleading. It’s not that we have 50% (or even 99%) non-human cells or non-human dna, it’s that tiny bacteria exist, mostly in our alimentary track, and can outnumber our mostly much larger cells. So we are plenty human with a lot of squatters, most who are helpful. Our defense system does it’s best to keep out the bad ones, but with unregulated immigration, you run the risk of overwhelming the system and impacting the health of the system. Thus, one should vet their aliens and control the immigration as they can.
As for the philosophical angle, I will appropriate Descarté “cogito ergo sum”. Wizard what makes us human isn’t the biology, but the capacity to reason. Some people seem to come up short in that measure….
Lewis Thomas explains the interplay of nature in The Lives of a Cell.
A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature".
(Link not working for this.) This seems hard to believe. I can't conceive how 90% of my cells, but not 90% of my mass, is foreign.
I'd like to see what Michael K. has to say about this.
The claimed seemed ridiculous. Thanks for doing the work so I didn't have to, Wa St Blogger.
"A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature"
For the Bidens it's even higher than 90%.
Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?!
In what way is that collection of bacteria, viruses, and parasites (with a small smattering of human cells) not really you?
Ignorance is Bliss
An Anarco-Syndcate Collective of Bacteria, Viruses, and Parasites working to overthrow the oppressive human-celled tyranny
The quip about ‘part of you that is really you“ just reminded me of the joke where a husband complains to his wife that there is 80 more pounds of her than what he legally married.
Can such jokes be referred to in public any more?
If not, I denounce myself, ala John Cleese
Most of the microbials live in our microbiome and are beneficial, if not completely understood. But it only takes ONE bad bacterium, amoeba or virus to start a bad chain reaction. This phrasing makes it seem as if 90% of the cells "in" or "on" the body are out to get you like that flatworm larva is, but that is misleading. Most of them work toward their little individual goals unaware they are greatly assisting us in our digestion and disease control. Last week came news that Alzheimer changes the gut bacteria profile and not the other way around as was previously hypothesized. It is an area ripe for intense exploration! Cue Amazing Journey sound track.
I prefer measuring human content by weight, rather than cell count.
This might have "stumped" the docs in Boston but where I practiced (Napa Valley), where there is a sizeable Hispanic migrant and seasonal worker population, it would be one of the first things we would suspect/expect. Any new seizure workup of course includes a CT scan, and our CTs of Hispanics with new onset seizures showed cysticercosis cysts frequently. I believe the disease is quite common in the Third World.
"More recent estimates, he noted, put the total number of human cells at anywhere from 15 trillion to 724 trillion, and the number of gut microbes at anywhere between 30 trillion and 400 trillion. Which gives a ratio that can best be expressed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯."
Here's How Many Cells in Your Body Aren't Actually Human
The internet giveth and the internet taketh away.
If you believe only 10% of your cells are human, then I suspect you might be right about only using 10% of your brain too.
The opening lines of the Tao te Ching:
==========
The Tao that can be told of
Is not the Absolute Tao;
The Names that can be given
Are not Absolute Names.
The Nameless is the Origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the Mother of All Things.
==========
With stuff ranging in size from leptons to a chunk of chicken salad passing in, out, through, and remaining resident for indeterminant lengths of time - can "I" really be separated by Name from the rest of the universe?
Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?!
I consider myself to be driving the body I inhabit.
I'd like to know how much of my weight is bacterial cells. So I looked it up. The actual ratio of human to bacterial cells is now thought to be 1:1 and the bacteria weigh about .2 kilograms. The wrong estimate was based on an exclusively male sample (possibly of 10-year-old boys?)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/
Cystocercosis is well known and I doubt the MGH doctors were that surprised.
Clickbait.
Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?!
E=mc², baby!
"A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature"
Sounds fake since viruses are not cells. And for other reasons.
Let's check!
"It's often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one. That's a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate."
"Doctors found that a [dead] tapeworm had been living in a 38-year-old man's brain for 20 years"!
"They" can't get the simplest information straight.
CJinPA said...
I can't conceive how 90% of my cells, but not 90% of my mass, is foreign.
Human cells, like the cells of all multicellular creatures, are very big compared to bacteria. And compared to viruses, they are huge.
Of course compared to my tapeworm they are tiny
Moe`s tape worm cure
Gahrie said...
I consider myself to be driving the body I inhabit.
That's what your gut bacteria want you to think...
"Did you know that only one in ten of the cells in your body is actually human? That's right. A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature"(Huffpo)
I think this only applies to Huffpo readers.
Calvin and Hobbes
Eat a cup of yogurt and you're introducing millions upon millions of bacteria cells into your body. And again the next day and the next.
Speaking gibberish? How do we know the worm hadn't gained control of his speech center, and was speaking wormish through him?
Seems highly appropriate: https://youtu.be/JOKn33-q4Ao
An anarcho-syndicalist commune of assorted pests.
Yep. I believe it. They look like some stuff I passed during my last visit to Guatemala.
Agree with the medical comments above. 40 years ago, when I was a pediatric resident, we were taught the most common reason for seizures in Mexican kids was cysticercosis
I'm just going to leave this right here.
I don't mean to keep reaching for another slice of pizza, but something almost non-human is making me crave it.
Remember Animal Planet's "Monsters Inside Me"?
https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/monsters-inside-me
Thanks, I passed @ Season1 EEEEWWWWWw
Dagwood writes, "How do we know the worm hadn't gained control of his speech center and was speaking wormish through him?"
It doesn't matter. Worms have nothing good to say about anybody.
"The infection was long gone, but part of his brain was scarred — and that scarred area was leading to the seizures.'"
Lets see how lipid nano mrna vax bits spread all over the body behave over time.
Give it to kids for longest timeline.....
I read an article recently that theorized that the success that Bengali province in India has had with use of Ivermectin against Covid infections is that that Ivermectin is used to kill parasites, and third-world countries like India with abysmal sanitation and water treatment are home to a great deal of parasitic infection. The writer believed that, by killing the parasite infections, the Ivermectin was resulting in stronger immune responses.
sings
But it was only fantasy
The wall was too high
As you can see
No matter how he tried
He could not break free
And the worms ate into his brain...
Me and my tapeworm,
Strolling down the avenue.
Me and my tapeworm,
Not a soul to tell our troubles to.
And when it's twelve o'clock,
We climb the stair.
We never knock,
For nobody's there.
Just me and my tapeworm.
All alone and feeling blue.
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