Endless Parasites (Tuomas Aivelo)

It has often been said that our gut contains more bacteria than cells in our body. Most of these are bacteria that are beneficial to us, in fact essential, but our interior also contains others that are less so, and can even contain parasites that are even considered dangerous due to the infections they produce.

Reaching these conclusions has not been easy due to the difficulty of their study. Currently, however, medicine and human biology have achieved considerable knowledge about these small creatures that accompany us throughout life. Their enormous number and their influence on both our well-being and disease make them very important.

On the other hand, each person contains their own cocktail of microorganisms, complicating the equation. Their setup depends on where they live, their environment, and many other considerations.

To shed some light on all this mystery, Tuomas Aivelo brings us “Endless Parasites”, a book in which this evolutionary biologist tries to answer many of the questions we may ask ourselves regarding the innumerable tenants of our body. Aivelo, for example, responds to the concern that recent situations, such as climate change, could alter the balance and encourage the appearance of a greater number of microorganisms capable of causing us diseases.

Throughout his book, the author passionately and humorously confronts crucial issues such as the origin of infectious diseases, the reasons why they affect humans, their danger, the ways to combat them, their great biodiversity, the effects of the environment on its development etc.

Convinced that parasitic organisms have played a fundamental role in human evolution, Aivelo updates us on which infectious diseases are most significant, something that has varied throughout history, or how parasites affect our living conditions. .

The author does not forget about those other organisms that are responsible for introducing some dangerous parasites into our body, such as mosquitoes or fleas. In this sense, we will discover that the human being is often responsible for the appearance of certain infectious diseases, due to the continuous modification of their habitat, facilitating the proliferation of certain vectors, but also that the application of new behaviors, such as hygiene, or techniques, including medicine, has allowed us to respond with better weapons in situations that in the past would have meant serious human losses.

As the author of his own blog, in which he has poured his knowledge on the subject for years, Aivelo has a lot of experience in communicating science to the general public. His text is therefore made with the less educated reader in mind and in explaining as best as possible those aspects that may seem more cumbersome.

Also navigating topics as current as the Zika virus or resistance to antibiotics, the book provides everything necessary for us to discover once and for all the fundamental relationship between the human species and the living microscopic world that surrounds us.

Paidos. 2022. Contexts Collection. Softcover, 364 pages. ISBN: 978-84-4934-030-7