We have always been taught to wash our hands after getting them dirty or before eating. Parents inspect their children’s hands before releasing them to run through the house, and this ritual has been passed along for generations. Germs, it is said, are bad for you and can make you sick.
Well, it seems as if protecting ourselves from germs has actually made us even sicker.
A group of researchers accidentally found that mice that lived in environments that weren’t 
so clean happened to have significantly reduced the incidence of diabetes. After noticing this striking difference between groups, the scientists started to play around a little bit.
They transferred some mice from the group with lower rates of diabetes to the cage with the group with higher rates to observe the response to the new surroundings. They found that newly transferred mice exhibited the same rates of diabetes as those in the high rate group.
Next, they transplanted feces from the low rate group into the cage with the high rate. The 
fecal matter from the low rate of diabetes was filled with more bacteria so that it would, in essence, infect the other group. It indeed worked and the group that was exposed to the matter had a drop in diabetes rates.
The authors of the study argue that by understanding the role of the immune system in diabetes, an autoimmune disease, the doctors could perhaps treat the immune system itself rather than just focusing on the glucose levels.
These conclusions weren’t unique, though. Another group of researchers in Finland had observed the same thing, but with human subjects, in a region bordering the Russia border. 
They noticed that type 1 diabetes was prevalent on the Finland side of the land where the economy and general standard of living was much better than that of Russia after the Cold War began.
The people on the Russian side of the border, yet in the same region of land, had much lower rates of type 1 diabetes. Their living standards, by contrast, were much lower and less sterile.
Together with the findings from Dr. Kostic’s studies, the group of scientists has concluded that available bacteria can, in fact, strengthen the immune system. From here, Dr. Kostic explores this relationship more closely by observing human infants that are prone to type 1 diabetes and documenting their home environments. By doing this, he could potentially directly link bacteria to diabetes prevention.
We are far away from making a medicine to prevent diabetes, but it feels to me that this might be the very first step!
[expand title=”References“]
Cell Host & Microbe. URL Link. Accessed March 3, 2017.
Insulinnation. URL Link. Accessed March 3, 2017.
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