The 100-year-old BCG vaccine against tuberculosis can reverse Type 1 diabetes to almost undetectable levels, an eight-year study has shown:
Used for almost a century to prevent tuberculosis, the BCG vaccine helps boost and regulate the immune system. The team also discovered that the jab speeds up the rate by which cells convert glucose into energy and tests on mice show that it could also be beneficial against Type 2 diabetes.
The new study involved 52 people with Type 1 diabetes. After three years of treatment average blood sugar levels had dropped by 10 per cent and by 18 per cent after four years. Treated participants had an average blood glucose score of 6.65, close to the 6.5 considered the threshold for diabetes diagnosis.
In comparison, the blood sugar of those in the placebo group continued to rise over the trial period.
More fodder for my opinion that we really aren’t discrete organisms, but colonies of commensal organic entities interacting to produce what we think of as “human”.
I will not be surprised if someone ever produces evidence that human consciousness is actually the result of something very like a disease process… Or, parasitism. I don’t hold out a lot of optimism for the idea that “people” are merely supercharged apes. There’s something else going on, although I would not want to even try to predict what it is, based on the evidence we have so far. The discovery that the cellular mitochondria which power much of our biology are actually captured and re-purposed bacteria…? Suggestive, in the extreme. One wonders what we will learn in the future, about ourselves. Who knows what’s lurking in the background of our genome and biology?
52 is a very small sample.
As always with most of science today in the news, I see no science, only statistics.