Professor Luke O'Neill

There are many, many different species there.

making it very difficult.

But this one, Barry Marshall famously found that Helicobacter in the gut was a huge risk factor for ulcers.

Guess what?

Barry wins the Nobel Prize.

If we kill those bacteria and antibiotics, ulcers go away.

And this was a massive medical advance because before Barry discovered this, ulcers were thought to be caused by stress,

by smoking.

The typical ulcer sufferer was a middle-aged man, not making his targets as a salesperson or whatever, drinking too many martinis and smoking too much.

And hey, he gets an ulcer.

But it turns out it's the bacteria that causes the ulcer.

Now, the second thing is that it was also known that having Helicobacter increases the risk of gastric cancer.

And that's why it's important to get rid of it.

Now, why would it do that?

Well, it causes inflammation, something I've often spoken about.

And if you irritate the gut,

with a bacteria that increases the risk of mutations in the cells in the gut that give rise to its humor developing.

So the irritation, like an irritant, and we know many irritants cause cancer, so do bacteria, and in particular Helicobacter was linked to gastric cancer, very importantly.

Another very important one, almost 20 odd years ago, Fusobacterium.

Now you're going to be hearing lots of long names of the names of these species, because each bacteria species has a really complicated name.