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Early-Life Microbes Ward¹ Off Asthma² 太干净也不是好事儿

“Asthma is a very prevalent disease in our society now. It wasn’t so 50 years ago. And we now realize that the very early life microbes seem to have set you up or not for asthma.”

在现在社会，哮喘是一种普遍的疾病。而在50年前，情况并不是这样。现在我们知道，生命早期的微生物让我们不会得哮喘。

Microbiologist Brett Finlay, from the University of British Columbia. In a study of Canadian infants, his team found “at three months of age, which is a really tiny little kid, there are four microbes, if you had these four microbes you had very very low risk of getting asthma, if you didn’t have these microbes you were at very very high risk of asthma.”

布雷特·芬利是英国哥伦比亚大学的微生物学家。在对加拿大婴儿的一项研究中，他的团队发现，“在婴儿非常小，仅有3个月的时候，它的体内存在4种微生物，如果体内含有这四种微生物，那么患哮喘病的几率就非常低。反之，则患病几率则比较高。”

Finlay spoke³ February 17th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement⁴ of Science in Boston. Where he also discussed a recent follow up study among kids in rural Ecuador.

2月17日，芬利在波士顿举行的美国促进协会年度会议上发表了上述讲话。同时还讨论了对厄瓜多尔农村的孩子进行了一个跟踪调查。

“And a big risk factor associated with asthma whether they had potable, clean water. So ironically the kids that got the clean water had higher asthma rates than the kids that had the dirty water. Now that makes sense in terms of microbial acquisition…it makes sense but I must admit I was surprised to see that, you’d think if we clean the water up that’s good for the world…this is all part of the big ‘hygiene⁵ hypothesis’…

与哮喘相关的一个大的风险因素是这些孩子们是不是有可饮用的、干净的水。但是，讽刺的是，饮用干净水的孩子患哮喘的几率要比饮用脏水孩子的患病率高。现在，微生物存在让上述结论说的通，但是我必须承认，我们原先以为，将水完全净化，将有益于这个世界……，这只是“卫生假说”的一部分……

I say we’re suffering from a hygiene hangover, we have cleaned our world up too much, and we’re just not getting the microbes that our grandparents got. And as a result that’s affecting many, many of the diseases that we experience in our society that we didn’t experience a hundred years ago...

我们正在遭受的是过度的干净，我们将这个世界清扫的过于干净，以至于我们没有继承自己祖父母所获得的微生物。结果，在现在的社会中我们经历了很多在100年以前都没有过的疾病……

“And one of the things that I’m starting to realize is that maybe these microbes are actually endangered species and you think about your great grandkids, they’re gonna have very different microbes than you do and as we urbanize more and more our microbes become less diverse. And anyone that knows ecosystems⁶, that’s not good, you want large diversity in rainforests, same as your microbes. So there are people that are bio-banking things, I’m not suggesting that maybe you should biobank your poop now and give it to your great grandkids, I don’t know.

现在我开始意识到的一点就是，可能这些微生物是濒临灭绝的物种，想一想我们未来的子孙，他们将和我们拥有完全不同的微生物哦，而原因是由于城市化，我们使越来越多微生物的多样性减少。知道生态系统的人，都知道生态系统状况并不好。我们想要微生物和热带雨林的一样，拥有生物多样性。有的人在收集生物样本库，我并不建议将自己的大便收入样本库，然后传承给你的后代，对此我保留自己的意见。

But…I worry we’ve gotten too clean and we have to ease off a bit…because we’ve taken a piece of our evolution right out of our bodies. We’ve evolved with these microbes all along, and they’re just not there anymore and I think we’re starting to see the effects in these diseases.”

但是，现在另我担心的是，我们太干净了，或许应该稍微缓和一下……因为我们正在剥夺自己身体内正在进化的一部分。一直以来，我们都是和微生物一起进化，然而，由于现在这些微生物不存在了，我们也就开始体会到了疾病对所带来的影响。