Baby gut study finds bacteria different after C-section births

A huge study of babies' stool samples has found key differences between infants born vaginally and via Caesarean section, offering clues about the development of the human immune system, researchers said on Wednesday.

Vaginally born babies got most of their gut bacteria from their mother, but C-section babies did not and had more bacteria linked to the hospital around them, the study found.

It is not clear what impact the difference may have on children's future health, and the findings should not deter women from having C-section births, the scientists leading the work said.

But the so-called "baby biome" project - the world's largest such study - had opened a window on a little-understood stage in the development of human immunity, they added.

"The first weeks of life are a critical window of development of the baby's immune system, but we know very little about it," said Peter Brocklehurst, a Birmingham University professor who co-led the study.

"We need to follow up ... these babies as they grow to see if early differences in the microbiome lead to any health issues."

The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem of millions of microbes and is thought by scientists to be important for how the immune system develops.

Previous research has suggested that a lack of exposure to some microbes in early life is implicated in autoimmune diseases such as asthma, allergies and diabetes.

But scientists have not yet been able to work out how important the initial gut microbiome - or "baby biome" - is to future immunity and health, or how a baby's microbiome develops, or what happens to it with different modes of birth.

In this research, published in the journal Nature, scientists from University College London, Wellcome Sanger Institute and Birmingham University used DNA sequencing to analyse more than 1,600 gut bacteria samples from 175 mothers and almost 600 babies.

In samples from mothers and from the babies at four, seven and 21 days old, the team found there was a significant difference between the two delivery methods - with vaginally delivered babies having many more health-associated bacteria from their mothers than babies born by Caesarean.

In place of some of the mother's bacteria, the C-section babies had more bacteria typically found in hospitals, the researchers said, and these bugs were also more likely to be drug-resistant.

"At the moment we don't understand the long-term consequences of this," Brocklehurst said at a briefing about the results. "It's clearly complex and we're only just beginning to scratch the surface."

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Scary Amounts of Mercury Have Been Found Lurking in The Permafrost

The northern hemisphere's permafrost regions have been concealing a really unpleasant surprise: mercury. A lot of mercury. Nearly twice as much mercury as the rest of the planet's natural mercury combined.

Researchers studied core samples from the Alaskan permafrost, and their estimates show 793 million kilograms of mercury have been trapped in the northern hemisphere's permafrost since the last Ice Age.

This finding has grave implications if the permafrost melts away.

And the melt has already started happening - in the Arctic, melting permafrost has revealed some giant ( thankfully dormant) viruses  tens of thousands of years old that could awaken and wreak havoc.

Deforestation has caused permafrost melt in Siberia, which in turn caused the ground to collapse into a giant crater; and in other parts of Siberia, permafrost thaw has been linked to the appearance of mysterious sinkholes and craters.

Now there's also mercury to worry about. If the permafrost continues to melt, it could release a tremendous amount of mercury, and this could, in turn, impact ecosystems all around the world.

"There would be no environmental problem if everything remained frozen, but we know the Earth is getting warmer," said lead author,  a hydrologist.

"Although measurement of the rate of permafrost thaw was not part of this study, the thawing permafrost provides a potential for mercury to be released - that's just physics."

 

Natural mercury enters the permafrost from the atmosphere. As part of the mercury cycle,  atmospheric mercury vapour binds with organic material in the soil, which is then buried by sediment. Over time, it is frozen into the permafrost.

To gauge the mercury levels in the permafrost, the team drilled 13 core samples between 2004 and 2012 from different sites around Alaska, selected for their diverse soil characteristics to represent the entire northern hemisphere.

The measurements taken by the team were consistent with published results for other tundra soils, and with 11,000 measurements taken from 4,926 other non-permafrost sites around the world.

According to the team's calculations, there are 793 gigagrams (793 million kilograms), or more than 15 million gallons, of mercury frozen in the northern hemisphere's permafrost. That is, the researchers said, roughly 10 times the amount of all human-caused mercury emissions over the last 30 years.

If we include non-permafrost soils in the permafrost regions, there are 1,656 gigagrams of mercury stowed away down there. This is nearly twice as much as is found in non-permafrost regions, the oceans, and the atmosphere combined.

If it were to leach into the waterways, it could have grave implications. Inorganic mercury can be transformed by microbes into methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Cases of methylmercury poisoning have occurred in humans after eating fish from methylmercury-contaminated water,  and it can cause central nervous system damage and birth defects.

"There's a significant social and human health aspect to this study," said a research hydrologist.

"The consequences of this mercury being released into the environment are potentially huge because mercury has health effects on organisms and can travel up the food chain, adversely affecting native and other communities."

And if the mercury gets into the atmosphere, it could travel around the world.

The next step in the research is to model how climate change could cause the permafrost to release mercury, and how it would spread around the world.

"24 percent of all the soil above the equator is permafrost, and it has this huge pool of locked-up mercury,"he said.

"What happens if the permafrost thaws? How far will the mercury travel up the food chain? These are big-picture questions that we need to answer."

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