If one species like e. coli flares up, maybe from food poisoning, it can overwhelm the immune system. The other type of food poisoning (like with botulism I think?) is where the bacteria have already contaminated food with their waste and it overwhelms the organs so the toxin reaches the body. But with so many variations of e. coli already in existence, I would expect the risk from an engineered version to be low.
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That said, I lost my gut health in late 2018 due to a number of factors including work stress, too many beers/cocktails and ignoring my body's response when I ate stuff like almond butter which I didn't know I was sensitive to. That punched holes through my intestines and gave me leaky gut. Which allowed gluten, lectins and lactose to pass the gut lining and trigger my immune system. Now I'm sensitive to foods containing those compounds, and they are in almost everything and especially processed foods. It took me at least 3 years to recover and I must largely avoid wheat and fast food now, which is.. annoying to say the least.
Gluten sensitivity has reached such levels that many people can only drink hard seltzer now, not beer. And having to offer gluten-free options has become a burden on restaurants. What most people don't realize is that gluten sensitivity can occur at any age unexpectedly. I look at it now like smoking: every time we eat grains, we run a small risk of becoming sensitized. IMHO that's mostly due to the increased use of wheat and gluten in processed foods, incentivized by the lowered cost of GMO crops:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-between-incr...
This was all predicted by a small minority of scientists in the 1990s and armchair activists like me who warned that GMOs would have unintended consequences. TANSTAAFL except with GMO foods.. right.
I'd choose GMOs for industry over messing with our food supply any day.
True
But the article did not address this, it should have.
It will be the big question before deployment
Suppose you're treating the engineered microbes like sourdough starter: Add them to nutrient solution, wait for desired effect, take a small sample, add to next batch.
You'd expect a selective pressure away from the engineered outcome, such that after X batches, your samples are overrun by wild-ish type mutants. But is that a merely academic concern, something that might happen after 500 batches, or are you out of luck by batch three?
I wonder how it compares to something like methane digesters in production and ease to maintain. Seems like it would produce less energy and not make nearly as good fertilizer, but be much less finicky and not require an anaerobic environment or careful temperature control.