‘Foreign Bodies’ Review: Migrant Microbes, Human Borders; COVID Lockdowns Altered Babies’ Microbiomes, and other C-Virus related stories

WSJ: ‘Foreign Bodies’ Review: Migrant Microbes, Human Borders:

Pandemics and plagues transmitted across human and animal populations have long challenged the efforts of nations to keep their citizens healthy

The wealth of nations depends on the health of nations. Plagues, like the poor, are with us always, though we might prefer to see neither. As Kyle Harper observed in “The Fate of Rome” (2017), economic integration in Augustus’ empire boosted population and incomes but also accelerated the movement of bacteria and viruses.

The western Roman empire’s economic and political decline started with the smallpox-like Antonine plague that began in A.D. 165, and intensified the following century with the Ebola-like Cyprian plague. In the sixth century, Justinian’s attempt to revive the empire from its eastern base in Constantinople foundered amid wet weather, poor harvests and what became a two-century bout of bubonic plague. The eastern empire did not so much fall as fall sick. A new force, Islam, surged into the power vacuum.

“In the end, all history is natural history,” writes Simon Schama in “Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations.” The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological.

As human population and prosperity rise, Mr. Schama contends, we face both an “ecological displacement” that is carrying “biological hitchhikers” into new territories and a “catastrophic destruction of biodiversity” that will send “at least a million species into extinction by the end of the century.” Cattle ranching, driven by Chinese demand for beef, is deforesting the Amazon. The American appetite for cheap meat has turned livestock factories into sumps of animal suffering and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The “filthy cages” of Chinese wet markets, along with trade in African bush meat, provide further opportunity for the spread of disease.

The 18th-century development of vaccination, Mr. Schama observes, was spurred by the mutation of smallpox into a potentially fatal virus. Voltaire caught it in 1723 and attributed his survival to drinking 200 pints of lemonade. European doctors subscribed to the ancient theory of humors, which called for brutally purging impurities from the blood, and French physicians were patriotically immune to their English peers’ discovery that a small dose of the “kindly pock” worked as a shield against full-blown infection. Meanwhile, inoculation by insufflation—blowing dried, powdered pus up the nostrils—was state policy in China. Voltaire said it showed that the Chinese were “the wisest and best governed people in the world.”

Inoculation, Mr. Schama writes, became a “serious big business” in commercial England, despite the inoculators’ inability to understand how it worked, and despite Tory suspicions that the procedure meant “new-fangled,” possibly Jewish, interference in the divine plan. In 1764, the Italian medical professor Angelo Gatti published an impassioned defense of inoculation that demolished humoral theory. Mr. Schama calls Gatti an “unsung visionary of the Enlightenment.” His work was a boon to public health, though his findings met resistance in France, where the prerevolutionary medical establishment was more concerned with protecting its authority.

The march of science did less for mental health. Then as now, the public struggled to separate the medical from the metaphorical. Inoculation meant the piercing of the epidermis and the deliberate contamination of the blood. The division between the pure and the impure was the frontier between the sacred and the profane. The overheated imagination was not cooled by germ theory, with its specter of invisible killers such as cholera, yellow fever and bubonic plague crossing political borders like microbial assassins. —>READ MORE HERE

COVID lockdowns altered babies’ microbiomes:

Babies born during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic have a different composition of gut microbes compared with those born before the introduction of lockdowns in March 2020, according to a handful of studies investigating the effects of pandemic control measures on infant health.

The gut microbiome — the colony of microorganisms that reside in the digestive tract — is important to many aspects of bodily function and development, and its imbalance has been linked to psychiatric disorders, skin conditions and gastrointestinal issues.

Babies acquire many gut microbes from their environment, and evidence is emerging to suggest that being born into the unique situation of a lockdown can have a lasting effect on the microbiome, which can, in turn, affect other aspects of infants’ development.

“The first 1,000 days are critical to pick up a healthy microbiome,” says Jun Sun, a microbiome researcher at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Without the proper establishment of beneficial bacteria during this period, babies are at higher risk of health issues further down the line, she says.

Isolated guts

Natalie Brito, a developmental psychologist at New York University, started studying the effects of early-life stress on infants and their gut microbiomes long before the pandemic. As lockdowns began in New York City in March 2020, Brito and her colleagues decided to use the opportunity to assess whether the restrictions would have an impact on infants’ microbiomes. During the first nine months of the pandemic, they remotely collected and analysed samples from 20 newborn babies in the area.

Their findings, published in Scientific Reports on 16 August, identified a lower diversity of microbes in each child and more-distinct profiles between children, compared with a cohort of similar babies that were born before the pandemic1. “The findings were surprising at first,” says Sarah Vogel, a developmental psychologist at Boston University in Massachusetts who was involved in the study. “There was no previous data to predict how a global pandemic might shape the gut microbiome.” But thinking about all the chances to acquire microbes that infants born during lockdown were missing out on, such as visits to playgrounds and shops, and contact with other children, the findings started to make sense, she says. —>READ MORE HERE

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