To me the title of this article, and several points contained within, where overly broad.

They give the impression that _having_ microbes in your mouth and on your skin is a cancer risk, which is most definitely not the case.

The connection between the microbiome and cancer and heart disease is coming more to light. And the articles point that certain microbes may contribute to cancer risk sounds like another significant new finding.

But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health.

Like the gut microbiome, it's the content that counts, not whether to have one or not...

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ortusdux 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The wording seems causational, while the data indicates a correlation.

"Altogether, the entire group of microbes boosted participants’ chances of developing the cancer by more than threefold."

I feel like you would need a study that observes the effect of introducing or remove these microbes from a population before you can draw this conclusion.

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blindriver 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health.

Can you point to a study that suggests this? I have no opinion one way or another but making statements like this without any backing is misinformation.

	▲	ebolyen 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is the initial purpose of a microbiome to be at least commensal, in that it is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain a sterile environment so the odds of a true pathogen colonizing a system is greatly reduced if you simply have a crowded space of neutral participants. Once that's true it does seem there's a lot of host and microbiome interactions we've only begun to explore, but it shouldn't be surprising that co-evolution of the microbiome and host begins to take over as soon as you have one. One great example is short-chain-fatty-acid (SCFA) producing bacteria in the human gut. [1] These seem to be essential, and if there was a general takeaway to improve health, it would be to eat your roughage so they can do their job. This is also why high alpha-diversity (community richness in particular) is such a dead-ringer for healthy vs diseased states. And frustratingly, is often exactly where the story ends for a lot of observational studies. Also, in case you are curious, artificially sterile mice (gnotobiotic mice) tend to act differently than other mice, which is pretty odd to be honest, and why the gut-brain axis is a plausible mechanism to research further. [2] [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...
	▲	dham 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Just like the gut you have to have the right bacteria. Not none. This is a study on Psoriasis which is caused by systematic inflamation. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/