Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco-immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care.

Historians of science have identified an ecological turn underway in immunology, driven by the mapping of the human microbiome and wider environmentalist anxieties. A figure is emerging of the human as a holobiont, composed of microbes and threatened by both microbial excess and microbial absence. Antimicrobial approaches to germ warfare are being supplemented by probiotic approaches to restoring microbial life. This article examines the political ecology of this probiotic turn in Western health care. It focuses on Necator americanus-a species of human hookworm-and its relations with immunologists. The analysis moves from a history of human disentanglement from hookworm, to contemporary anxieties about their absence. It examines the reintroduction of worms for helminthic therapy and explores emerging trajectories for probiotic health care involving the synthesis, modification, and/or restoration of worms and their salutary ecologies. The conclusion differentiates these trajectories and identifies an emerging model of "post-paleo" microbiopolitics.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Medical Anthropology Quarterly

• Publication date

  2019-03-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Political Science, History, Environmental Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/maq.12466PMID 30003599
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Staying with the Trouble

  2020cited by this paper
• Geography and postgenomics: how space and place are the new DNA

  2018cited by this paper
• Can Parasitic Worms Cure the Modern World's Ills?

  2017cited by this paper
• Production and Use of Hymenolepis diminuta Cysticercoids as Anti-Inflammatory Therapeutics

  2017cited by this paper
• Evolution of the hygiene hypothesis into biota alteration theory: what are the paradigms and where are the clinical applications?

  2017cited by this paper
• Disease in three dimensions: Tissue engineering takes on infectious disease

  2017influential reference
• Parasites, ghosts and mutualists: a relational geography of microbes for global health

  2017cited by this paper
• Resistant bodies, malaria and the question of immunity

  2017cited by this paper
• Probiotic Environmentalities: Rewilding with Wolves and Worms

  2017cited by this paper
• Nematodes and human therapeutic trials for inflammatory disease

  2017cited by this paper
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (review)

  2017influential reference
• Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama

  2017influential reference
• The Life of Cheese

  2017cited by this paper
• Hookworm infection

  2016cited by this paper
• Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics

  2016cited by this paper
• Gut Buddies Multispecies Studies and the Microbiome

  2016cited by this paper
• Sounding the Limits of Life

  2015cited by this paper
• Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History

  2015cited by this paper
• The Intestinal Microbiota Contributes to the Ability of Helminths to Modulate Allergic Inflammation

  2015cited by this paper
• The Human Microbiome and the Future Practice of Medicine.

  2015influential reference
• Host Biology in Light of the Microbiome: Ten Principles of Holobionts and Hologenomes

  2015cited by this paper
• Overcoming Evolutionary Mismatch by Self-Treatment with Helminths: Current Practices and Experience

  2015cited by this paper
• Parasites and human evolution

  2014influential reference
• Getting Ahead of One’s Self?: The Common Culture of Immunology and Philosophy

  2014cited by this paper
• Blowback: new formal perspectives on agriculturally driven pathogen evolution and spread

  2014cited by this paper
• Helminth therapy or elimination: epidemiological, immunological, and clinical considerations.

  2014cited by this paper
• De-Politicizing Parasites: Reflections on Attempts to Control the Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases

  2014cited by this paper
• Hookworm disease and its relationship to capitalism and urban development

  2014cited by this paper
• (Self-) infections with parasites: re-interpretations for the present.

  2014cited by this paper
• The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas

  2014cited by this paper
• Strathern beyond the Human: Testimony of a Spore

  2014cited by this paper
• Evolutionary biology and anthropology suggest biome reconstitution as a necessary approach toward dealing with immune disorders

  2013cited by this paper
• The Human Hookworm Vaccine

  2013cited by this paper
• Prerequisites for the pharmaceutical industry to develop and commercialise helminths and helminth-derived product therapy.

  2013cited by this paper
• The hookworm pharmacopoeia for inflammatory diseases.

  2013cited by this paper
• Mind-altering microorganisms: the impact of the gut microbiota on brain and behaviour

  2012cited by this paper
• A prescription for clinical immunology: the pills are available and ready for testing. A review

  2012cited by this paper
• “Snake-oil,” “quack medicine,” and “industrially cultured organisms:” biovalue and the commercialization of human microbiome research

  2012cited by this paper
• Nonself help: how immunology might reframe the Enlightenment.

  2012cited by this paper
• Hygiene Hypothesis and Autoimmune Diseases

  2012cited by this paper
• Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species

  2012cited by this paper
• A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals

  2012cited by this paper
• Reconstitution of the human biome as the most reasonable solution for epidemics of allergic and autoimmune diseases.

  2011cited by this paper
• Diversity and dialogue in immunity to helminths

  2011cited by this paper
• Migrant Clinics and Hookworm Science: Peripheral Origins of International Health, 1840–1920

  2010cited by this paper
• Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation

  2010cited by this paper
• A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body

  2009cited by this paper
• What are the consequences of the disappearing human microbiota?

  2009cited by this paper
• Do helminth parasites protect against atopy and allergic disease?

  2009cited by this paper
• The hygiene hypothesis and Darwinian medicine

  2009cited by this paper
• The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies

  2009cited by this paper
• POST‐PASTEURIAN CULTURES: The Microbiopolitics of Raw‐Milk Cheese in the United States

  2008cited by this paper
• War of the worms

  2007cited by this paper
• Helminths as governors of immune-mediated inflammation.

  2007cited by this paper
• Lay Immunology, Local Foods and Rural Identity: Defending Unpasteurised Milk in England

  2003cited by this paper
• Human Domestication Reconsidered1

  2003cited by this paper
• Immunity

  2003cited by this paper
• The effect of infections on susceptibility to autoimmune and allergic diseases.

  2002cited by this paper
• How much human helminthiasis is there in the world?

  1999cited by this paper
• Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900-1920

  1996influential reference
• Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State

  1990cited by this paper
• Hay fever, hygiene, and household size.

  1989influential reference

• Microbiome research in practice: priorities for clinical translation and impact.

  2026cites this paper
• How high techs change conservation strategies? A scoping review of the philosophical trace behind a rewilding 4.0

  2026cites this paper
• Caring for uncommon bodies: Commoning yoseba through indifferent care and working together

  2024cites this paper
• Well-Being Within and Beyond the Body: Toward Careful Planetary Engagements

  2024cites this paper
• Infrastructuring zoonoses: Zoonoses, infrastructures, and the life giving and taking politics of pandemic prevention

  2024cites this paper
• The Multispecies Sociality of Digestion and the Microbiopolitics of the Belly Among Somalis in Ethiopia

  2024cites this paper
• The Immune System, Immunity and Immune Logics: Troubling Fixed Boundaries and (Re)conceptualizing Relations

  2024cites this paper
• Capitalization and the production of value at the nexus of academia and industry: the case of a microbiome startup

  2024cites this paper
• Resetting urban human‐microbial relations in pandemic times

  2023cites this paper
• Viral Entanglements

  2023cites this paper
• Controlled Hookworm Infection for Medication-free Maintenance in Patients with Ulcerative Colitis: A Pilot, Double-blind, Randomized Control Trial

  2023cites this paper
• A Questionnaire-based Study Exploring Participant Perspectives in a Perinatal Human Challenge Trial

  2023cites this paper
• Modelling the evolution of holobionts: an incomplete review

  2023cites this paper
• Between the genotype and the phenotype lies the microbiome: symbiosis and the making of ‘postgenomic’ knowledge

  2023cites this paper
• Hookworm infections: Reappraising the evidence for a role of neutrophils in light of NETosis

  2022cites this paper
• Religion, Animals, and the Theological Anthropology of Microbes in the Pandemicene

  2022cites this paper
• Securing participation in global pork production networks: biosecurity, multispecies entanglements, and the politics of domestication practices

  2022cites this paper
• Industrializing Bacterial Work: Microbiopolitics, Biogas Alchemy, and the French Waste Management Sector

  2022cites this paper
• Mediating Response-ability in Planning: The Elusiveness of the Cambodia Waste Management Report

  2022cites this paper
• Estranged companions: Bed bugs, biologies, and affective histories

  2021influential citation
• Understanding antibiotic use: practices, structures and networks

  2021cites this paper
• Toward Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts, and Environments in and Beyond the Biosocial Sciences.

  2021cites this paper
• The Code of Pangolins

  2021cites this paper
• Air care: an 'aerography' of breath, buildings and bugs in the cystic fibrosis clinic.

  2020cites this paper
• Making the microbiome public: Participatory experiments with DNA sequencing in domestic kitchens

  2019cites this paper
• The Paleo paradox: Re-wilding as a health strategy across scales in the anthropocene

  2019cites this paper
• The Precariousness of the Non-Human Other: Situating Lyme Disease Within a Multispecies Framework

  2019cites this paper
• Hookworms in Emergency Department: The ＂Vampire＂ Within.

  2018cites this paper