Tingle in your Tummy

Necator Americanus larvae at 400x magnification. These are small suckers.

You can have some if you want to, for only like 3.800$ you can have you own colony of intestine parasites. The advantage? You could get rid of nasty allergies, astma, myelic enchepalitus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, certain forms of autism, crohns disease and a whole range of so called autoimmune diseases.

What used to be called the "hygiene hypothesis", which was based on the finding that these autoimmune diseases rarely occur in less developed countries, where the plethora of infectious diseases is abundant.

The former theory was that the immune defense had to be "imprinted" by being affected by lots of different diseases to "learn" which cells to attack (diseases) and which to save (your body and everything that isn't a pathogen).

Lately however, the scientists have found that autoimmune diseases are commonly caused by a lack of regulatory T-cells, a certain kind of white blood cell that keeps the immune defense in order, so that it won't attack friendly cells.

What they also found is that certain parasites, in order to survive inside the environment of the human body, have developed different ways to regulate the production of regulatory T-cells.
By downregulationg the immune system in this way, the parasites can survive inside the human body long enough to complete their life cycle and lay eggs to a new generation of parasites.

Throughout the milleniums that these parasites have coexisted with mankind, our immune system and the parasites immune-downregulatory effects have adapted to each other. This means that without these parasites, some people's immune defense will be inherantly upregulated, resulting in a too easily-aggravated immune response in face of certain diseases and allergens.

There is a lot of research in this area, but some people are too eager to reap the fruits of this newfound research, so instead of waiting for (patented) medical treatments to surface, they decided to infect themselves with certain parasites, and even start businesses to help other get infected by these parasites.

One example is Jasper Lawrence, who after several years of handicapping asthma, finally was relieved of his symptoms by infection from the intestinal parasite Americanus Nemator. Which ultimately resulted in the business http://autoimmunetherapies.com/, in Tijuana, Mexico, where you too can get infected by your very own hookworm colony. The worms live up to around 12 months, when they die and you need reinfection for the benefits to continue.

Of course, the treated will suffer from a down-regulated immune defense, with possibly all the other side effects that might rise from that, but then again, the usual treatments for autoimmune diseases have even more severe effects on the immune defense, and several other uncomfortable side-effects as well.

Once further research has been done, the scientists might be able to separate the proteins or other substances accountable for the upregulation of regulatory T-cells, and make that into a medicine for people suffering from autoimmune diseases. But right now, parasite infection is the only way to go if you want some up-regulating-T-Cell-regulating-action.