The Doll As Metaphor - 2

In the first post of this series issue of the psychological imagination impact that dolls can  have on children (and even the adults that those children become) was touched upon.

The impact that microbes have on the physical systems of the body as a child grows was also touched upon.

Let's take that a bit further and discuss the direct impact that microbes have on your brain and my brain, both as children and as adults:

"The microbiota plays important roles in host metabolism and immunity, and its disruption affects adult brain physiology and behavior. Although such findings have been attributed to altered neurodevelopment, few studies have actually examined microbiota effects on the developing brain. This review focuses on developmental effects of the earliest exposure to microbes. At birth, the mammalian fetus enters a world teeming with microbes which colonize all body sites in contact with the environment. Bacteria reach the gut within a few hours of birth and cause a measurable response in the intestinal epithelium. In adults, the gut microbiota signals to the brain via the vagus nerve, bacterial metabolites, hormones, and immune signaling...In adults, gut bacteria communicate with the brain in at least four ways: via direct neural connections, bacterial metabolites, hormones, and immune signaling..."

(Effects of the Microbiota on Neonatal Brain Development). See also Normal gut microbiota modulates brain development and behavior, Feeding the brain and nurturing the mind: Linking nutrition and the gut microbiota to brain development, Gut instincts: microbiota as a key regulator of brain development, ageing and neurodegeneration). 

Dredd Blog criticizes the "mass-production-of-animals-for-food" industry because of their promiscuous and indiscriminate overuse of toxic (to microbes) antibiotics:

"Advances in culture-independent research techniques have led to an increased understanding of the gut microbiota and the role it plays in health and disease. The intestine is populated by a complex microbial community that is organized around a network of metabolic interdependencies. It is now understood that the gut microbiota is vital for normal development and functioning of the human body, especially for the priming and maturation of the adaptive immune system. Antibiotic use can have several negative effects on the gut microbiota, including reduced species diversity, altered metabolic activity, and the selection of antibiotic-resistant organisms, which in turn can lead to antibiotic-associated diarrhea and recurrent Clostridioides difficile infections. There is also evidence that early childhood exposure to antibiotics can lead to several gastrointestinal, immunologic, and neurocognitive conditions. The increase in the use of antibiotics in recent years suggests that these problems are likely to become more acute or more prevalent in the future. Continued research into the structure and function of the gut microbiota is required to address this challenge."

(Antibiotics as Major Disruptors of Gut Microbiota). Dredd Blog hypothesizes that this war on anything that moves in our guts (enteric microbiota) causes the death and dismemberment of so many microbes and viruses that it makes some observers "play with dolls" and have "magic words":

"Last January, a team of researchers searching for the coronavirus in New York City’s wastewater spotted something strange in their samples. The viral fragments they found had a unique constellation of mutations that had never been reported before in human patients — a potential sign of a new, previously undetected variant [a.k.a. dead bodies of microbes and viruses] ... because wastewater samples contain an amalgamation of lineages circulating in the sewer-shed, it is not possible to reconstruct individual genomes using standard methods."

(Mysto SARS-CoV-2 in NY , p. 2). This Halloween-like shit-scape is getting curiouser and curiouser (Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs, 2).

The failure in this analysis is engendered by not following the laws of cause and effect (cause: the producer of an effect, cf. Causality). Treating the effect never eradicates the cause.

The appendices in today's post are a continuation of the post & appendices in (The Doll As Metaphor), with some descriptive improvements.

They show research results (A, B, E, F, K, M, S1, S2, S3, V; lookup version, taxon id here) from the search for SARS-CoV-2 virus genes and segments in an additional slate of gut microbes (your microbiome).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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A friendly virus reports back to us about what it is like to enter into a vastly larger single-celled host [in doll magic language: "to take control over its highly complex machines"] (The New Paradigm: The Physical Universe Is Mostly Machine).

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