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Anonymous
>>319499
There are much worse types of parasites around, trust me.
At the moment there are a few trials around based on the theory that immune disorders, like asthma, allergies or the really vicious ones that turn the body on its own internal organs, are caused by the fact that we're too 'clean'. Basically, the human immune system has evolved to cope with parasites, we've removed the parasites and the human immune system is now attacking the human. (They were considering my mother for one of these trials but she didn't fit all the criteria.) I have it in my head that that hookworm was one of the parasites they were trialling, but now that I think of it, it's probably something else. The beastie comes from undercooked pork meat, lives in the intestines and is shed with the faeces in a predictable life cycle. As an added bonus, the eggs of this beastie only hatch if they've been buried in moist soil for a number of months/weeks; thus, with modern sanitisation, the chance of the infection spreading or even perpetuating itself is very, very low. And then, when the cycle is over, the human subject is again reinfected and it goes around again. The weird thing, or so I'm told, is that during endoscopies to check the progress of these parasites, each individual would have a certain number of worms living in them, no more, no less. No matter how many eggs they swallowed, only a set number of worms would be found in their systems each time and this set number varied from individual to individual, but never varied in the individual themselves.
Frankly, with autoimmune disorders around that make garden variety asthma look like a walk in the park, Crom's Disease, catastrophic organ failure, hypoallergies etc, I think that, provided a certain balance is maintained with a comparatively benign beastie, I'd be happy to live with a few parasites.
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