/oss/taxonomy/term/3424/all en /oss/article/medical-critical-thinking/blood-microbiome-probably-not-real <p>Up until recently, if bacteria were detected in your blood you would be in a world of trouble. Blood was long considered to be sterile, meaning free of viable microorganisms like bacteria. When disease-causing bacteria spread to the blood, they can cause a life-threatening septic shock.</p> <p>But the use of DNA sequencing technology has allowed researchers to more easily detect something that had been reported as early as the late 1960s: bacteria can be found in the blood and not cause disease.</p> Fri, 28 Jun 2024 01:14:28 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9989 at /oss /oss/article/medical/your-appendix-may-not-be-useless-after-all <p>What does the appendix even do? When we think about this little finger-shaped pouch hanging off of our digestive tract, it’s often as a ticking time bomb.</p> Fri, 21 Jun 2024 18:17:49 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9985 at /oss /oss/article/critical-thinking-health-and-nutrition/microbiome-and-its-myth-making-machine <p>As promising new discoveries are made in the health sciences, the telephone game begins. Scientists put their best foot forward when presenting their results. The public relations department at their institute further digests their findings and adds a dash of hype. Journalists amplify and simplify, social media influencers garble the message, and start-ups capitalize on the hype to sell unproven health solutions. Before you know it, you’re grabbing a cup of coffee while your colleague tells you that they heard cancer was caused by bad bacteria in your gut.</p> Fri, 11 Aug 2023 06:37:32 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9598 at /oss /oss/article/health/dark-matter-inside-your-gut <p>There is a kind of dark matter inside our intestinal tract. “Dark matter” is the phrase coined for the matter that is implied to be present in the universe based on physicists’ calculations but that cannot be seen yet. Scientists who study tiny living things are facing their own type of dark matter: invisible microbes that are indirectly detected. They call it “microbial dark matter.”</p> Fri, 21 May 2021 19:41:42 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 8742 at /oss /oss/article/health/do-household-cleaners-trigger-child-obesity <p>You may have seen the headlines from a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The study suggested that household cleaners could be contributing to obesity by disrupting the gut bacteria that make up your microbiome.</p> <p>In reality though, the paper didn’t quite make that claim. What the study actually did was send questionnaires to new mothers and then measured the bacteria in their baby’s stool when they were 3 months of age. They then checked in to see if their babies were overweight or obese at 3 years of age.</p> Thu, 20 Sep 2018 16:39:31 +0000 Christopher Labos MD, MSc 7363 at /oss /oss/article/did-you-know/are-babies-born-c-section-more-risk-those-born-vaginally <p>Babies who are delivered by C-section don’t go through the birth canal, and as a result they don’t get the beneficial microbes that babies born via the birth canal receive. This might help explain why C-section babies are at a higher risk for a variety of diseases. A recent study suggests, however, that this can be mitigated by slathering babies just after birth with a gauze pad that soaked up the microbes in the mothers’ birth canal right before birth. Why? Because it helps restore and normalize the baby’s microbiome.</p> Tue, 21 Feb 2017 04:37:40 +0000 Emily Shore, B.A 1499 at /oss