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Comment by rincebrain | Hacker News Reader

The three things that come to mind are

A) it's extremely time-consuming and difficult to capture the mechanism for how organisms act in the middle of the human body in the middle of their lifecycle when we're not even sure what we're looking for, so it's just not been found yet.

B) it might just be safe and cost-effective enough to give people worms temporarily as a treatment instead for now. (I don't know if this is the case, but if they're doing it for a study, the risk profile can't be that bad...)

C) even if we isolate whatever mechanism they have (and can synthesize it readily), it's still an immune modulator, so all the same caveats for steroid creams might apply at any significant dose.

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> even if we isolate whatever mechanism they have (and can synthesize it readily), it's still an immune modulator, so all the same caveats for steroid creams might apply at any significant dose.

Sure, but it wouldn't be an infection you could spread to other people. It also wouldn't be an infection that could grow, of its own accord, to undesirable levels within you. That's a huge improvement.

I suspect any final form for a “live” treatment, would probably be a two part sort of thing. “Take worms/eggs day 1, day 2, 3 or 4 you take the anti worming drug to prevent the worms getting much of a foothold”

The pig whipworm eggs used previously for this purpose can hatch in the human body but they cannot survive, so no foothold therapy is needed. Instead, they're just enough to attract the attention of a perhaps overly-excitable immune system.

> The pig whipworm eggs used previously for this purpose can hatch in the human body but they cannot survive

If this became a routine treatment, it seems pretty likely that they'd start being able to survive.

That doesn't really follow.

For something to evolve like that you need to re-introduce the mutated strains back to the source.

If there is no re-introduction (which there wouldn't be, because the worms would be bred in an isolated environment and not the sewer system), then there isn't really anything to worry about. There is no selection pressure at the point where breeding and distribution occurs.

even if the 'gradually-evolving' process isn't provided, isn't there some genetic chance? (be it really small -- like lottery?)

The mutation would have to happen in the lab and not in the wild, since the pills would come from the lab.

I imagine if such a thing did occur, they would just kill the batch they were breeding and start over from a known strain.

(Not a microbiologist, so who knows though)

Why would you need to reintroduce the mutated strains back to the source? They already have a plan for migrating from one host to another host; they don't need to migrate from their host back to a lab so their laboratory-bred eggs can be intentionally introduced into another host.

You might end up with strains that could survive in humans, but those wouldn't be the strains being prescribed to people.

Be warned that parasites are generally pests, and in normal circumstances don't typically cause serious problems for a host.

However when crossing hosts signals can get crossed and they can cause serious health problems like eating your retina, brain, hearts, etc. Be very careful with parasites that aren't evolved for humans.

They don't usually cause serious problems for hosts they coevolved with.

Necator Americanus was always specialized to infect humans. But it evolved to infect Africans, who brought it to the new world. For blacks, it doesn't pose much of a problem. For whites, it does.

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