why are diseases always negative? Are there diseases that have positive effects on human beings?
In: Biology
There are a huge number of viruses and bacteria that are useful to our bodies. Our guts, for example, are colonized with a microbiome of bacteria that both help digest food and act as part of our immune system by destroying other microbes that cause disease.
Our skin hosts a similar microbiome – at birth your skin is colonized with bacteria from skin to skin contact with your mother. This forms the basis of a microbiome that eats/kills microbial life that would otherwise cause infections.
Phage therapy is a form of anti-bacterial treatment where viruses are identified that eat specific bacteria but are not detrimental to humans. If you have an infection they can identify the bacteria and inject you with a specific virus that will eat the infecting bacteria.
Along a more drastic line is pyro-therapy. An example of this was before we had antibiotics a method to treat syphilis was to infect the patient with malaria. The extreme fevers from malaria would kill the syphilis and then they’d give you quinine to cure the malaria (assuming you survive the fevers…).
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