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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite quotes on this subject from Kurt Harris:

>This is why I am very hesitant to offer ANY specific prescriptions for what to do about your gut biome. The advice to eat dirty vegetables or even start walking around barefoot in the dirt or drinking pond water or whatever "natural" activity you can think of is VERY DANGEROUS.

>The reason is not all parasites are "old friends", only some of the ones that are commensals that we co-evolved with. Getting toxoplasmosis from a cat, or a zoonotic helminth from dog shit or a dead raccoon or a pig tapeworm will do your immune system no favors and could even kill you.

>DO NOT PLAY AROUND WITH THIS CONCEPT UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

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This comment looked interesting but was a little tricky to track down, so here it is in its entirety:

http://huntgatherlove.com/node/693#comment-476489235

The rest of his comments (click his name) are all similarly interesting.

You're exactly right. I had posted a portion of the quote on twitter and literal googling with that turned up nothing. I'm guessing those comments aren't being indexed.

If you're curious, the guy used to run a blog about paleo, although as time went on he started to hate that label and the movement in general (I imagine a lot of that comment thread is hard to understand without some context into the community around that time). Anyway, he hasn't posted anything in over a year. http://www.archevore.com/

  | walking around barefoot in the dirt [...] is
  | VERY DANGEROUS

Really?

In many parts of the country, yes, you get worms this way.

Hookworms directly or some other worms via eggs into small cuts.

Not in the US. They're very rare in the US, and everywhere with indoor plumbing.

People who are deliberately trying to get infected as a treatment for their Crohn's or arthritis have literally resorted to travelling to the third world.

This whole concept sounds like a South Park episode waiting to happen.

You mean eating with your bum?

Curing asthma with hookworm...

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/16/3408/66053

And hookworm is trivially treated with antibiotics.

Soil transmitted helmiths (aka worms) are a huge medical burden on the world. CDC estimates more than 1 billion people are infected.

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