First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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I’m beginning to feel like a broken record, but again all Blake et al. show us are (third order polynomic? – they don’t tell) regressions and no data whatsoever. With nearly 900 subjects this undoubtedly is a large and expensive study, but it still boils down to 430 per kind of inequity, 60 per country, 6 per year of age and three per sex. One would like to see data before deciding whether the regression result is of any value at all or not.
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There is a rapidly growing body of work about the importance of the gut microbiome with Chevalier et al. adding yet another facet. Seeing all that leads to the question how much damage the ubiquitous and massive antibiotic poisoning for no pressing and life threatening reason may be doing to us and also the lack of access to a reasonably wide variety of beneficial microbes through too much cleanliness and sterility in our homes.