The reason we are experiencing a pandemic of autoimmune diseases in industrialised countries is that, in the last 50-100 years, we’ve got rid of the intestinal worms that had been man’s constant companions for millions of years, and on whose presence our immune systems have come to rely. If you have the wrong genetic defect, and no worms, you’re at greatly increase risk of developing an autoimmune disease, whereas someone with the same genetic defect who is hosting a few worms is far less likely to develop an autoimmune disorder.

Unfortunately, Dr Chhabra is one of a number of researchers involved in the pharmaceutical industry who are desperately trying to extract “drugs from bugs” in order to produce lucrative medicines. Drugs, however, are not the solution to an evolutionary problem, and medicines built around single molecules are notoriously prone to produce serious, even fatal, side effects. Intestinal worms do not do this.

As Dr David Elliott (University of Iowa) has said, “When you give someone a live worm, it’s like giving them the factory that makes the products and letting the factory do what it needs to do… Evolution has already created this thing.”

Prof William Parker (Duke University) agrees: “The learned thinking pattern for medical professionals and biomedical researchers is to envision isolation and characterization of the individual components produced by helminths, with the goal of creating new helminth-inspired drugs to treat disease. On the one hand, this approach is consistent with the general practice of modern medicine and the common approach used to find new drugs today. On the other hand, recapitulating the effects of an integral member or members of the biome using a single or even a handful of pharmaceuticals may prove extremely difficult. Indeed, given the complex and continuous nature of the interactions between host and helminth that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, the design of therapeutics to entirely and effectively recapitulate this interaction may prove impossible.”

In claiming that a pill is “a whole lot cleaner than putting a worm in your body” Dr Chhabra eloquently indicates the considerable distance between his own thinking and the scientific cutting edge, where it is now acknowledged that the larger organisms such as parasitic worms are essential in maintaining our bodily ecosystem.

As Professor Roberts (Manchester University) explains: "It is like a three-legged stool - the microbes, worms and immune system regulate each other. The worms have been with us throughout our evolution and their presence, along with bacteria, in the ecosystem of the gut is important in the development of a functional immune system."
www.manchester.ac.uk/.../?id=5841

Readers of this article should also consider the comments of Bilbo, et. al., in ‘Reconstitution of the human biome as the most reasonable solution for epidemics of allergic and autoimmune diseases’.
biology.duke.edu/.../Bilbo&al_2011.pdf