IBD: an emergent disease among Ethiopian Jews migrating to Israel

I am not buying the hygiene hypothesis only bc my hygiene never changed throughout my life yet I developed CD in my 40's.
I am more prone to believe, at least in my case, it has something to do with pollution/pesticides that travel with weather patterns. I usually always flare after every cold front that reaches south Louisiana. I am thinking that as the front passes thru the plains and all the agriculture land that contains many chemicals, those particles are picked up and transported down to my region and low and behold, I get sick. I am very sensitive to chemicals and have done better by eating organic and carefully washing fruits and veggies but as soon as the jet stream changes, so does my health. This is just a theory of mine that I am looking at and will be testing in the near future by moving to an area in the NW on the pacific that will not be subject to these weather patters. I may find it makes absolutely no difference but it is worth a try.

Guess it's true that bad news travels fast, it's unbelievable how many people are affected by IBD today and the rise in pediatric IBD in North America is as scary as it is sad.

Dikid said...
Very interesting article
I Feel bad for those Ethiopians who are suddenly subject to western diseases they never heard of.

Yeah, because there are no horrible diseases in Africa. I think I'd rather take my chances with IBD in a country where I can actually get medical treatment.

Dikid - It's certainly no paradise in Africa... Africans may rarely get IBD, but there are certainly plenty of other horrible things they can get. Like a ball of worms in their gut.

www.meb.uni-bonn.de/dtc/primsurg/docbook/html/x3330.html

That's why I get a little impatient with those who harp on about how we're all too clean nowadays. There may be something in it, but living in unsanitary conditions is vastly worse for your health.

I agree with quincy actually. It's likely the Ethiopians who came down with IBD in Israel had the genes which predisposed them to getting it. On top of that, if a poor person in rural Africa developed IBD, what are the chances of this actually being diagnosed? Practically zero, I should think. The median time to diagnosis of IBD in industrialised countries is 2 years, IIRC. It's not particularly easy to diagnose and requires expensive tests which very few Africans would be able to afford or access. I'm also hazarding a guess that diarrhoea due to infectious causes or parasites is common, and thus as a symptom perhaps wouldn't draw much attention.

I have not read the full research paper but I expect that the researchers have been as thorough as they can in demonstrating that IBD was not previously common in these people's families or indeed their wider communities.

Having said that, here's a forum post from a chap in Ethiopia with CD so it does exist there
www.crohnsforum.com/showthread.php?t=10054

I do agree that is is hard to compare with the past, I think that pre modern medicine I would have died from my pan colitis and may have gone down in the records as a young girl dead from some sort of dysentery. It would be fascinating to be able to find medical evidence from the East European Shtetls to see if people were suffering from IBD type symptoms long before the Ashke****s moved West.

This entire thread is anti semitic!

beatuc: This entire thread is anti semitic!

LOL I'll take that as sarcasm given the trigger-happy mislabelling of people on that front.

It's been long know that ashke**** jews have long been susceptible to crohn's disease (even more so than UC) it is what it is, doesn't mean anyone is blaming them for it...far as I know it's fairly common in Europe, both my parents born and lived in Hungary until the revolution in 1956 when they escaped, I just happened to be born n Canada with some other half-siblings as well but have brothers and sisters from both my parents (previous marriages) born in Hungary and only one half-sister has IBS no IBD....mom had UC.

Facts are facts just as Dikid pointed out, no reason to turn this fact into something else...especially since this topic has been discussed many many times here on HW with no one trying to make more out of it than what it is.

Very interesting article. I think the hygiene hypothesis has merit. Clearly there are other diseases in less developed countries that can be harmful or dangerous, but we can always re-evaluate own practices without feeling attacked by criticism.

I think this case could be the perfect situation to test theories about epigenetics and environmental causes having an effect on autoimmune disorders.

Possibly we could find strains of gut bacteria that only exist in Ethiopia or other less developed countries, and learn how to manage our own gut microbiota better. Imagine if UC or Crohn's could be cured with probiotics only!

You see there is 54 individual countries in Africa, and in most of them there are different communities with vastly varying degrees of hygiene, living standards and health.

You'd be very wrong if you thought modernization and the increase of hygiene contributed to the improvement of the general health, modernization only improved the health of the minority who could "afford" it.

if you want to blame something, try asking how old is the chicken you're buying at the market and what did they feed it to make it so huge prematurely, or how come the fresh produce look like they are 3d printed to specs having the same size shape color..etc

According to multiple GIs I have met autoimmune diseases need to have 3 factors to meet a certain condition to trigger the disease

1) Genetic predisposition
2) Environmental factor
3) Dietary factor

2 of these triggering factors are external and those Ethiopians could be easily exposed to these, since naturally if you change your country you will be exposed to a different environment factors and a different diet.