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0:00
Hi, I'm Brett Finlay.
The talk today is about the Role
of the Microbiota in Asthma.
And I'm situated
in the University
of British Columbia,
in Vancouver, BC.
0:11
So there's a lot of discussion
about why diseases,
characteristic of
Western nations, are increasing.
And one of the concepts
that's being kicked around
is something called
the hygiene hypothesis,
and this suggests that,
perhaps, we're actually living
too cleanly in our childhood now
and we're not
exposed to many microbes
we normally would have been
exposed to early in life.
And there's lack of exposure
early in life
might mean that later in life,
we actually
react to these things
in various
autoimmune type responses.
So we know
that infectious disease rates
have absolutely plummeted
in developed countries
over the last 50 years.
This is due
to the advent of vaccines,
antibiotics, and also our quest
to clean up our world.
We sterilize water,
we ensure food is safe,
and we really have done
everything in our control
to get rid of microbes,
and as a result,
we have succeeded
in really decreasing
infectious disease rates.
However, in those same 50 years,
we've seen a massive spike
in what we call
Western lifestyle diseases.
These are obesity,
type-1 diabetes,
asthma, et cetera.
And this has corresponded
precisely with the decreased
infectious diseases.
And this has
led to the current concept that,
well, maybe in our quest
to get rid of these infections,
we've actually cleaned up
our world too much,
and as a result,
we're actually...
Microbes
might have something to do
with playing a role in how these
diseases may actually develop.
1:33
So Martin Blaser has championed
a term he calls
the "disappearing microbe"
hypothesis,
that is, that we are killing off
all our microbes
that are normally beneficial,
and each generation,
we have less and less microbes.
So, you know, the average
child gets
10-12 courses of antibiotics
before they get to school,
and we also know that
antibiotics
have a drastic effect
on the microbes in and on us.
So on the graph shown on this
is just really
a characterization
of the microbiota
in three different mice,
an untreated mouse,
a streptomycin-treated mouse,
and a metronidazole-treated
mouse.
Streptomycin and Metronidazole
are two antibiotics
that obviously
kill different microbes.
But the take home message
here is that
by using these antibiotics,
we're affecting
many, many microbes
and entire microbial composition
that is the microbiota
found in these animals.
So the idea is that
as we clean our world up,
we use all these antibiotics
and we try and get rid off
all these microbes
that maybe we actually
can't even go back
to have the microbes that
our great, great grandfathers
and grandparents actually had.
So maybe, this is causing
these microbes to disappear,
and maybe
this is also compounding
these Western lifestyle
type diseases.
