Why microbiome scientists share responsibility/blame for the climate crisis.

Climate scientists have been active in spreading their warnings and advocating for major steps to avoid catastrophe.

Microbiome scientists cover similar catastrophic phenomena (host-native microbial extinctions, and drastic decreases in health and function due to gut dysbiosis), yet ignore, or do very little to implement the obvious steps for remediation. This is made all the worse by two factors:

1. Climate scientists do not have the power to bring about any actions regarding their warnings. But microbiome scientists do. Via clinical trials, microbiome scientists hold the most powerful tools to take action. Climate scientists require major political action, whereas microbiome scientists could massively stem their catastrophes via the medical, research, and education systems.

2. The inability of climate scientists to bring about the major actions necessary to avoid their catastrophes is directly caused by the microbiome catastrophes (IE: the vast majority of the population being poorly functioning due to poor health & development, which stems from gut dysbiosis). High functioning (intelligent, rational, empathic) people do not ignore the plethora of extremely harmful phenomena that are plaguing the human race.

So what should microbiome scientists be doing, and what are they doing?

After I sent this article I wrote to various scientists, a few of them were authors on this paper published a few months later. It seems to be in complete agreement. The most important aspects being the ones to stop and reverse the microbial extinctions: reduce antibiotic use, and find the few people with the least damaged, most optimal gut microbiomes and start transferring their gut microbes to other people (FMT - fecal microbiota transplants).

But what ARE they doing?

UCSD:

I wrote to both Rob Knight and the research director, Sandrine Miller (first time in Mar 2019) about doing FMT clinical trials with high quality FMT donors.

Despite being right next to a major Olympic training facility, and multiple other major professional & university sports organizations, they've declined to take advantage of that, and instead seem to continue to focus on the microsetta project. Which to me is like spending 5 minutes taking someone's temperature while their leg is cut off and they're bleeding out.

They then switched to a focus on COVID-19 research, which makes me all the more frustrated and perturbed, and I explain why here.

Dr Martin Blaser:

I have a lot of respect for Dr Martin Blaser. I started following the microbiome research since ~2014. I saw lots of studies coming out about the wide variety of permanent harms from antibiotics. In 2018 I learned that the reason I'd been seeing so many antibiotic studies was likely in large part due to the warnings that Dr Blaser had been giving, at least as far back as 2011.

Dr Blaser wrote this commentary on FMT on Nov 2019, in which he says:

Carefully conducted clinical trials provide the best opportunity to weigh benefits and risks to determine the indications for FMT use.

Yet he is not running any FMT clinical trials, nor involved in FMT clinical trials in any way from what I've seen.

I wrote to him on Oct 2019 about FMT clinical trials to reverse the extinctions he writes about, but received no response other than the lukewarm paper above a month later.

Thus far, his efforts seem to be based around proving the damage from antibiotics via publishing antibiotic studies, as well as reaching out to laypeople via his book and some media interviews.

From my perspective, I've seen very little action (as far as reduction and reversal) come about from these things. Antibiotics are still widely abused, and very little is being done to stop and reverse the damage. Overwhelmingly I still only see antibiotic resistance mentioned, and when I reach out to laypeople about this subject it seems nearly entirely useless. They seem to overwhelmingly lack the ability to process and act on this information. It's quite bizarre that such a large anti-vaccine laypeople community has existed on such flawed/lacking evidence, yet for some reason people just love their antibiotics, regardless of any amount of evidence showing their vast, permanent, severe harms.

Antibiotics for GBS was one of the specific uses Dr Blaser pointed at in his book. Yet recently, a group of 3 US "experts" ignored most of the current evidence, and published guidelines still advocating for the non-evidence-based use of antibiotics for GBS. I wrote to various entities about this, but didn't see Dr Blaser publish any statements on it. 

 

What are others doing?

Hundreds of other FMT clinical trials are getting very poor results, likely due to low donor quality due to the people running the trials & selecting the donors having poor understandings of the gut microbiome's impacts on the whole body, in addition to having poor understandings of human health and development, poor intuition & problem solving abilities, as well as genuine difficulty in finding the fewer than 0.4% that qualify to be high quality donors [1].

Perhaps the people mentioned above think they also lack that expertise, and are thus waiting for someone else to figure it out, AND don't trust that I have/can?

 

What am I doing?

Yet again I am left/forced to take things into my own hands.