Talmudic Question #7

 

Despite recent findings that some archaea may partici­pate in oral disease, the question about their general absence from the Pantheon of Pathogens is still around.  Any new ideas as why they rarely if ever cause disease even though some are adapted to living in animal hosts (for example, the cow's rumen, the colon of humans).

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Christine Josenhans]

I didn't want to be deterred from my current writing but then I got hooked (again) by this intriguing question, which I had heard already some time ago.
I had some spontaneous ideas of tentative answers, which my have been breeding inside of me since I heard that question first:

1)maybe archea, which are indeed pretty ubiquitous (water, big bang soup etc.,) possess something which made some kind of common ancestor vertebrates which were susceptible to being diseased by archea become extinct long ago. - this raises a different question, what is disease? -

2)another possibility that I like more, but it has some common origin, is that we have archea (one, multiple? Do we know them already?) living somewhere inside us (where? are they endosymbionts? do they live extracellularly, I know we have some in our guts), and that is why we (have to) tolerate them well, otherwise we would be killed by them or have been extinct long ago - maybe species to which they were harmful became already extinct (back to 1)).

Another question rising from the former one: Maybe there are diseases due to incompatibility with our internal archea. Or there are human diseases which we already know but we have't linked them to archea.

I have to think about this question some more, but it is a real captivating one to think about. Thanks for giving people this blog.
Christine