Belinda Smith

They get into that blood vessel, actively penetrating through into the blood vessel.

And then they're passively swept with the blood circulation through the lungs or through the heart and into the lungs.

And once they're in the lungs, something tells them they've arrived in the lungs.

And then they break out of the blood vessels in the lungs into the alveolar spaces, the air sacs, and they creep, actively creep all the way up your windpipe.

and then you cough and swallow them, and that's how they reach the gut.

So it's the most tortuous of life cycles, but it's predictable.

They don't go wandering off into the central nervous system or other tissues, which is why we have no problem getting ethical approval from our ethics committees to do these clinical trials.

Sure, but the whole trial is about the fact that they managed to survive in the human body by secreting something, as you said, through the mouth or whatever it is, that's stabilising the human body and the inflammation goes away.

Yeah.

So we've evolved with these, Robin, over millennia.

When vertebrates crawled out of the swamps, we had worms on board.

These guys are part of our biome.

We all appreciate our microbiome and the importance of it.

This is the macro biome, the part of our biome you can see with the naked eye.

And worms have so intimately co-evolved with humans that our immune system has developed an entire arm that's in response to worms.

And humans now in Australia, you know, we don't experience worms like we did 100 years ago or 150 years ago.

So our immune system expects these signals.

We've evolved to expect these signals from the worms when we first emerge.

And the truth is, in developed countries, we don't get that anymore.

And so our immune systems are not primed to expect these little guys to be on board.